which we worked, while yawning crevasses below our course were
distinctly unpleasant reminders of what might happen should the leader
slip and the rope man be insecurely anchored with his ice axe.

Then a mile up steep snow slopes, and detours around the base of lesser
piles of rock rising almost perpendicularly from the floor of snow, and
we were at the foot of the final climb. A last wild scramble up a
chimney, the way made risky by slipping stones and treacherously rotten
rock, a tug of the rope, a helping hand, and we were on the summit of
Olympus!

[Illustration: "The Humes glacier, over which we went to Mount Olympus"]

[Illustration: "Our nature-made camp in Elwha basin"]

From no peak that either of us had ever climbed, in the Pacific Playland,
Alaska, or Northern Europe, had we looked upon more picturesquely
rugged, varied, or altogether fascinating mountain scenery. Olympus
stands at the dividing of the ways of a half-dozen watersheds, and from
its summit one sees canyons radiating in all directions from the
glaciers that cluster on its flanks and those of its lesser neighbors,
in whose depths are growing streams that rush away to Puget Sound and
the Pacific. All about, west, northeast, and south, are snow-clad,
saw-tooth peaks, lined with glaciers. Billowing over these wild summits
and hiding them each in turn, were wondrously tinted cloud banks, whose
overhanging effects of light and shadow, and freakish alteration of the
view made of the broad panorama a titanic kaleidoscope.

For an hour we sat there, our sweaters about us, munching raisins and
reveling in the scenic wonders of the world below us. From a metal tube,
well protected in a rock monument, we took and read the records of
previous climbers, left since the first ascent in 1907. And then, after
the habit of our kind, we added the story of our own expedition to the
others and started on the homeward trail toward our cave and patient
Billy.

CHAPTER XI

"The God Mountain of Puget Sound"

Less than fifty years ago what is now Seattle numbered scarce a thousand
inhabitants, and the present city of Tacoma was a cluster of shacks
about a sawmill. Puget Sound, to-day a highway of commerce, was an
almost unknown inland sea, its waters furrowed only by the prows of
Indian canoes.

But for centuries beyond number the great mountain of Puget Sound has
been as it is to-day, the mountain beautiful, dominating all the Sound
country. In Seattle