aks in the east gladder than I
did, unless it may be Cotter, who has in later years confessed that he
did not go to sleep that night. Long before sunrise we had done our
breakfast and were under way, Hoffman kindly bearing my pack, and Brewer
Cotter's.

Our way led due east up the amphitheatre and toward Mount Brewer, as we
had named the great pyramidal peak.

Awhile after leaving camp, slant sunlight streamed in among gilded
pinnacles along the slope of Mount Brewer, touching here and there, in
broad dashes of yellow, the gray walls, which rose sweeping up on either
side like the sides of a ship.

Our way along the valley's middle ascended over a number of huge steps,
rounded and abrupt, at whose bases were pools of transparent snow-water
edged with rude piles of erratic glacier blocks, scattered companies of
alpine firs, of red bark and having cypress-like darkness of foliage,
with fields of snow under sheltering cliffs, and bits of softest velvet
meadow clouded with minute blue and white flowers.

As we climbed, the gorge grew narrow and sharp, both sides wilder; and
the spurs which projected from them, nearly overhanging the middle of
the valley, towered above us with more and more severe sculpture. We
frequently crossed deep fields of snow, and at last reached the level
of the highest pines, where long slopes of debris swept down from either
cliff, meeting in the middle. Over and among these immense blocks, often
twenty and thirty feet high, we were obliged to climb, hearing far below
us the subterranean gurgle of streams.

Interlocking spurs nearly closed the gorge behind us; our last view was
out a granite gateway formed of two nearly vertical precipices,
sharp-edged, jutting buttress-like, and plunging down into a field of
angular boulders which fill the valley bottom.

The eye ranged out from this open gateway overlooking the great King's
Canon with its moraine-terraced walls, the domes of granite upon Big
Meadows, and the undulating stretch of forest which descends to the
plain.

The gorge turning southward, we rounded a sort of mountain promontory,
which, closing the view behind us, shut us up in the bottom of a perfect
basin. In front lay a placid lake reflecting the intense black-blue of
the sky. Granite, stained with purple and red, sank into it upon one
side, and a broad spotless field of snow came down to its margin on the
other.

From a pile of large granite blocks, forty or fifty feet up abov