ortune to be next to the victim of such an
attack, and himself inhaled a small quantity of the deadly powder. The
lung trouble which shortly developed hastened, if it did not actually
cause, his death.

That we might reach the Moengal Pass at daybreak in order to see the
superb panorama of Bromo and the adjacent volcanoes as revealed by the
rising sun, we started from Tosari at two o'clock in the morning. Our
mounts were wiry mountain ponies, hardy as mustangs and sure-footed as
goats. And it was well that they were, for the trail was the steepest
and narrowest that I have ever seen negotiated by horses. The Bright
Angel Trail, which leads from the rim of the Grand Canon down to the
Colorado, is a Central Park bridle-path in comparison. In places the
grade rose to fifty per cent and in many of the descents I had to lean
back until my head literally touched the pony's tail. It recalled the
days, long past, when, as a student at the Italian Cavalry School, I
was called upon to ride down the celebrated precipice at Tor di Quinto.
But there, if your mount slipped, a thick bed of sawdust was awaiting
you to break the fall. Here there was nothing save jagged rocks. We
started in pitch darkness and for three hours rode through a night so
black that I could not see my pony's ears. The trail, which in places
was barely a foot wide, ran for miles along a sort of hogback, the
ground falling sheer away on either side. It was like riding
blindfolded along the ridgepole of a church, and, had my pony slipped,
the results would have been the same.

But the trials of the ascent were forgotten in the overwhelming
grandeur of the scene which burst upon us as, just at sunrise, we drew
rein at the summit of the Moengal Pass. Never, not in the Rockies, nor
the Himalayas, nor the Alps, have I seen anything more sublime. At our
feet yawned a vast valley, or rather a depression, like an excavation
for some titanic building, hemmed in by perpendicular cliffs a thousand
feet in height. Wafted by the morning breeze a mighty river of clouds
poured slowly down the valley, filling it with gray-white fleece from
brim to brim. Slowly the clouds dissolved before the mounting sun until
there lay revealed below us the floor of the depression, known as the
Sand Sea, its yellow surface, smooth as the beach at Ormond, slashed
across by the beds of dried-up streams and dotted with clumps of
stunted vegetation. Like the Sahara it is boundless--a symbol of
so