.

I must say this for my uncle, that he stuck as close to me as possible.
He never lost sight of me, and on many occasions his arm supplied me
with firm and solid support. He was strong, wiry, and apparently
insensible to fatigue. Another great advantage with him was that he had
the innate sentiment of equilibrium--for he never slipped or failed in
his steps. The Icelanders, though heavily loaded, climbed with the
agility of mountaineers.

Looking up, every now and then, at the height of the great volcano of
Sneffels, it appeared to me wholly impossible to reach to the summit on
that side; at all events, if the angle of inclination did not speedily
change.

Fortunately, after an hour of unheard-of fatigues, and of gymnastic
exercises that would have been trying to an acrobat, we came to a vast
field of ice, which wholly surrounded the bottom of the cone of the
volcano. The natives called it the tablecloth, probably from some such
reason as the dwellers in the Cape of Good Hope call their mountain
Table Mountain, and their roads Table Bay.

Here, to our mutual surprise, we found an actual flight of stone steps,
which wonderfully assisted our ascent. This singular flight of stairs
was, like everything else, volcanic. It had been formed by one of those
torrents of stones cast up by the eruptions, and of which the Icelandic
name is stina. If this singular torrent had not been checked in its
descent by the peculiar shape of the flanks of the mountain, it would
have swept into the sea, and would have formed new islands.

Such as it was, it served us admirably. The abrupt character of the
slopes momentarily increased, but these remarkable stone steps, a little
less difficult than those of the Egyptian pyramids, were the one simple
natural means by which we were enabled to proceed.

About seven in the evening of that day, after having clambered up two
thousand of these rough steps, we found ourselves overlooking a kind of
spur or projection of the mountain--a sort of buttress upon which the
conelike crater, properly so called, leaned for support.

The ocean lay beneath us at a depth of more than three thousand two
hundred feet--a grand and mighty spectacle. We had reached the region of
eternal snows.

The cold was keen, searching and intense. The wind blew with
extraordinary violence. I was utterly exhausted.

My worthy uncle, the Professor, saw clearly that my legs refused further
service, and that, in fact, I was