Not so the cold; that commanded entire respect, whether carefully abstracting our animal heat through the bed of gravel on which we lay, or brooding over us hungry for those pleasant little waves of motion which, taking Tyndall for granted, radiated all night long, in spite of wildcat bags, from our unwilling particles. I abominate thermometers at such times. Not one of my set ever owned up the real state of things. Whenever I am nearly frozen and conscious of every indurated bone, that bland little instrument is sure to read twenty or thirty degrees above any unprejudiced estimate. Lying there and listening to the whispering sounds that kindly drifted, ever adding to our cover, and speculating as to any further possible meteorological affliction, was but indifferent amusement, from which I escaped to a slumber of great industry. We lay like sardines, hoping to encourage animal heat, but with small success.
The sunrise effect, with all its splendor, I find it convenient to leave to some future traveller. I shall be generous with him, and say nothing of that hour of gold. It had occurred long before we awoke, and many precious minutes were consumed in united appeals to one another to get up and make coffee. It was horridly cold and uncomfortable where we were, but no one stirred. How natural it is under such circumstances to
“Rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.”
I lay musing on this, finding it singular that I should rather be there stiff and cold while my like-minded comrades appealed to me, than to get up and comfort myself with camp-fire and breakfast. We severally awaited developments.
At last Clark gave up and made the fire, and he has left me in doubt whether he loved cold less or coffee more.
Digging out our breakfast from drifted sand was pleasant enough, nor did we object to excavating the frozen shoes, but the mixture of disintegrated trachyte discovered among the sugar, and the manner in which our brown-stone front had blown over and flattened out the family provisions, were received by us as calamity.
However, we did justice to Clark’s coffee, and socially toasted our bits of meat, while we chatted and ate zestfully portions not too freely brecciated with lava sand. I have been at times all but morbidly aware of the power of local attachment, finding it absurdly hard to turn the key on doors I have entered often and with pleasure. My own early home, though in other hands, holds its own against greater comfort, larger cheer; and a hundred times, when our little train moved away from grand old trees or willow-shaded springs by mountain camps, I have felt all the pathos of nomadism, from the Aryan migration down.
As we shouldered our loads and took to the ice-field I looked back on our modest edifice, and for the first time left my camp with gay relief.
Elation of success and the vital mountain air lent us their quickening impulse. We tramped rapidly across the ice-field and down a long spur of red trachyte, which extended in a southerly course around the head of a glacier. It was our purpose to descend the southern slope of the mountain, to a camp which had been left there awaiting us. The declivity in that direction is more gentle than by our former trail, and had, besides, the merit of lying open to our view almost from the very start. It was interesting, as we followed the red trachyte spur, to look down to our left upon névé of the McCloud glacier. From its very head, dislocation and crevasses had begun, the whole mass moving away from the wall, leaving a deep gap between ice and rock. In its further descent this glacier pours over such steep cascades, and is so tortuous among the lava crags, that we could only see its beginning. To avoid those great pyramidal masses which sprang fully a thousand feet from the general flank of the mountain, we turned to the right and entered the head of one of those long, eroded glacier cañons which are scored down the slope. The ridges from both sides had poured in their freight of débris until the cañon was one mass of rock fragments of every conceivable size and shape. Here and there considerable masses of ice and relics of former glaciers lay up and down the shaded sides, and, as we descended, occupied the whole broad bottom of the gorge. We congratulated ourselves when the steep, upper débris slope was passed and we found ourselves upon the wavy ice of the old glacier. Numerous streams flowed over its irregular face, losing themselves in the cracks and reappearing among the accumulation of bowlders upon its surface. Here and there glacier tables of considerable size rose above the general level, supported on slender ice-columns. As the angle here was very steep, we amused ourselves by prying these off their pedestals with our alpine stocks, and watching them slide down before us.
More and more the ice became burdened with rocks, until at last it wholly disappeared under accumulation of moraine. Over this, for a half mile, we tramped, thinking the glacier ended; but in one or two depressions I again caught sight of the ice, which led me to believe that a very large portion of this rocky gorge may be underlaid by old glacial remains.