"'The Grand Peak!' I shouted. 'We'll name it for you'"
My exultant cry died away on my lips. I halted and stood gaping in speechless amazement at the peak that loomed skyward over beyond the lesser height we had mounted. What we had taken for the Grand Peak was no more than a satellite that had masked the Titan from our view! As we gazed from our hard-won crest, there uprose before us, grander than ever, the vast bulk of the mighty mountain, its sublime summit glittering with eternal snows. But the nearest ridge of its stupendous pyramidal base was yet a full sixteen miles distant!
I turned and shouted the discovery to Miller and Brown, who toiled up beside us to stare at the awesome beauty of the Peak in dull wonderment.
At last Pike regained his usual firm composure.
"We will begin the return march," he ordered, without betraying a trace of his keen disappointment either in look or voice.
"Send them back," I replied, nodding toward Brown and Miller. "Let us go on and make the attempt alone."
"My thanks to you, John!" he exclaimed. "But it would be madness, sheer madness. Through these snows we could not reach the base of the Peak short of a day's march; and look at that ascent! I doubt if any man could scale those heights."
"Not at this season. Yet, if you give the word to make the attempt—"
"No!" he rejoined. "Without food, and clad as we are in summer wear, no! It is enough to have ascended this peak, without our being so mad as to attempt the impossible."
"Then the sooner we reach the plain, the better," I said, pointing to the mountain side behind us.
While we had stood viewing the indescribable grandeur and sublimity of the Peak and the snow-clad sierras which stretched away in savage majesty to north and south of their mighty chieftain, the clouds below us were rolling upwards, were enveloping the entire mountain upon which we stood. Fearful of being lost in a snowstorm upon these bleak heights, we descended rapidly down a cleft, and regained our bivouac at the foot of the mountain just as the snow began to fall.
Here we found our blankets and other camp equipment as we had left them. But the ravens had robbed us of all our food, other than an unstripped fragment of the deer's ribs. Though one of the men had killed a partridge during our descent, the bird and the lean deer bones together formed a scant enough meal for four men who had not eaten in two days.
About noon the next day we shot two buffaloes, upon whose flesh we gorged ourselves like Indians, and I, for one, am convinced that we had well earned the full meal.
In the valley, all up and down the creek, we found many old Comanche camps, but the Indians had undoubtedly gone south for the Winter.
The next day brought us back to our little stockade on the Arkansas.