hen this final danger flashed upon me, I became nerve-shaken for the
first time since setting foot on the mountains, and my mind seemed to
fill with a stifling smoke. But this terrible eclipse lasted only a
moment, when life blazed forth again with preternatural clearness. I
seemed suddenly to become possessed of a new sense. The other self,
bygone experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel,--call it what you
will,--came forward and assumed control. Then my trembling muscles
became firm again, every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through a
microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with
which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon
wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete.

Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is still more
savagely hacked and torn. It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in
the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders
that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the
strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found
a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag in the
blessed light.

How truly glorious the landscape circled around this noble
summit!--giant mountains, valleys innumerable, glaciers and meadows,
rivers and lakes, with the wide blue sky bent tenderly over them all.
But in my first hour of freedom from that terrible shadow, the sunlight
in which I was laving seemed all in all.

Looking southward along the axis of the range, the eye is first caught
by a row of exceedingly sharp and slender spires, which rise openly to a
height of about a thousand feet, above a series of short, residual
glaciers that lean back against their bases; their fantastic sculpture
and the unrelieved sharpness with which they spring out of the ice
rendering them peculiarly wild and striking. These are "The Minarets."
Beyond them you behold a sublime wilderness of mountains, their snowy
summits towering together in crowded abundance, peak beyond peak,
swelling higher, higher as they sweep on southward, until the
culminating point of the range is reached on Mount Whitney, near the
head of the Kern River, at an elevation of nearly 14,700 feet above the
level of the sea.

Westward, the general flank of the range is seen flowing sublimely away
from the sharp summits, in smooth undulations; a sea of huge gray
granite waves dotted with lakes and meadows, and