utterly exhausted. Despite his hot and
feverish impatience, he decided, with a sigh, upon a halt. He called the
eider-duck hunter to his side. That worthy, however, shook his head.

"Ofvanfor," was his sole spoken reply.

"It appears," says my uncle with a woebegone look, "that we must go
higher."

He then turned to Hans, and asked him to give some reason for this
decisive response.

"Mistour," replied the guide.

"Ja, mistour--yes, the mistour," cried one of the Icelandic guides in a
terrified tone.

It was the first time he had spoken.

"What does this mysterious word signify?" I anxiously inquired.

"Look," said my uncle.

I looked down upon the plain below, and I saw a vast, a prodigious
volume of pulverized pumice stone, of sand, of dust, rising to the
heavens in the form of a mighty waterspout. It resembled the fearful
phenomenon of a similar character known to the travelers in the desert
of the great Sahara.

The wind was driving it directly towards that side of Sneffels on which
we were perched. This opaque veil standing up between us and the sun
projected a deep shadow on the flanks of the mountain. If this sand
spout broke over us, we must all be infallibly destroyed, crushed in its
fearful embraces. This extraordinary phenomenon, very common when the
wind shakes the glaciers, and sweeps over the arid plains, is in the
Icelandic tongue called "mistour."

"Hastigt, hastigt!" cried our guide.

Now I certainly knew nothing of Danish, but I thoroughly understood that
his gestures were meant to quicken us.

The guide turned rapidly in a direction which would take us to the back
of the crater, all the while ascending slightly.

We followed rapidly, despite our excessive fatigue.

A quarter of an hour later Hans paused to enable us to look back. The
mighty whirlwind of sand was spreading up the slope of the mountain to
the very spot where we had proposed to halt. Huge stones were caught up,
cast into the air, and thrown about as during an eruption. We were
happily a little out of the direction of the wind, and therefore out of
reach of danger. But for the precaution and knowledge of our guide, our
dislocated bodies, our crushed and broken limbs, would have been cast to
the wind, like dust from some unknown meteor.

Hans, however, did not think it prudent to pass the night on the bare
side of the cone. We therefore continued our journey in a zigzag
direction. The fifteen hundred feet which remaine