down there,
and now it actually was beyond human power to get back again. But what
cared we? "Sufficient unto the day"--We were bound for that still
distant, though gradually nearing, summit; and we had come from a cold
shadowed cliff into deliciously warm sunshine, and were jolly, shouting,
singing songs, and calling out the companionship of a hundred echoes.
Six miles away, with no grave danger, no great difficulty, between us,
lay the base of our grand mountain. Upon its skirts we saw a little
grove of pines, an ideal bivouac, and toward this we bent our course.

After the continued climbing of the day, walking was a delicious rest,
and forward we pressed with considerable speed, our hobnails giving us
firm footing on the glittering glacial surface. Every fluting of the
great valley was in itself a considerable canon, into which we
descended, climbing down the scored rocks, and swinging from block to
block, until we reached the level of the pines. Here, sheltered among
loose rocks, began to appear little fields of alpine grass, pale yet
sunny, soft under our feet, fragrantly jewelled with flowers of fairy
delicacy, holding up amid thickly clustered blades chalices of turquoise
and amethyst, white stars, and fiery little globes of red. Lakelets,
small but innumerable, were held in glacial basins, the scorings and
grooves of that old dragon's track ornamenting their smooth bottoms.

One of these, a sheet of pure beryl hue, gave us as much pleasure from
its lovely transparency, and because we lay down in the necklace of
grass about it and smelled flowers, while tired muscles relaxed upon
warm beds of verdure, and the pain in our burdened shoulders went away,
leaving us delightfully comfortable.

After the stern grandeur of granite and ice, and with the peaks and
walls still in view, it was relief to find ourselves again in the region
of life. I never felt for trees and flowers such a sense of intimate
relationship and sympathy. When we had no longer excuse for resting, I
invented the palpable subterfuge of measuring the altitude of the spot,
since the few clumps of low, wide-boughed pines near by were the highest
living trees. So we lay longer with less and less will to rise, and when
resolution called us to our feet the getting up was sorely like Rip Van
Winkle's in the third act.

The deep glacial canon-flutings across which our march then lay proved
to be great consumers of time; indeed it was sunset when we reac