the right hand the glittering, tiny threads of streams
draining the mountain range into the Chulitna and Sushitna Rivers, and
so to Cook's Inlet and the Pacific Ocean, spread themselves out; to the
left the affluents of the Kantishna and the Nenana drained the range
into the Yukon and Bering Sea.

Yet the chief impression was not of our connection with the earth so far
below, its rivers and its seas, but rather of detachment from it. We
seemed alone upon a dead world, as dead as the mountains on the moon.
Only once before can the writer remember a similar feeling of being
neither in the world nor of the world, and that was at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado, in Arizona, its savage granite walls as
dead as this savage peak of ice.

[Sidenote: The Dark Sky]

Above us the sky took a blue so deep that none of us had ever gazed upon
a midday sky like it before. It was a deep, rich, lustrous, transparent
blue, as dark as a Prussian blue, but intensely blue; a hue so strange,
so increasingly impressive, that to one at least it "seemed like special
news of God," as a new poet sings. We first noticed the darkening tint
of the upper sky in the Grand Basin, and it deepened as we rose. Tyndall
observed and discussed this phenomenon in the Alps, but it seems
scarcely to have been mentioned since.

It is difficult to describe at all the scene which the top of the
mountain presented, and impossible to describe it adequately. One was
not occupied with the thought of description but wholly possessed with
the breadth and glory of it, with its sheer, amazing immensity and
scope. Only once, perhaps, in any lifetime is such vision granted,
certainly never before had been vouchsafed to any of us. Not often in
the summer-time does Denali completely unveil himself and dismiss the
clouds from all the earth beneath. Yet we could not linger, unique
though the occasion, dearly bought our privilege; the miserable
limitations of the flesh gave us continual warning to depart; we grew
colder and still more wretchedly cold. The thermometer stood at 7 deg. in
the full sunshine, and the north wind was keener than ever. My fingers
were so cold that I would not venture to withdraw them from the mittens
to change the film in the camera, and the other men were in like case;
indeed, our hands were by this time so numb as to make it almost
impossible to operate a camera at all. A number of photographs had been
taken, though not half we shoul