From the mossy basin of the Ptarmigan we climb with ropes up a broken escarpment and there upon the very lip of the glacier are blossoms so unearthly in form and colour as to seem the merest ghosts of flowers. One is a dark, ocean-blue bell and another an ashen-green thing furred over with a beard as soft and colorless as a moth's wing. From this eminence a stormy, wind-tossed little lake, the Gem, flashes angrily-bright waters beneath snow splashed, wonderfully stratified peaks, and there, through a gateway in the mountains, spreading out in a vast plateau of white, lies the glacier, undulating in frozen waves like a polar sea. Even under its shroud of snow one can trace its course by the seams and wrinkles of a congealed current. It is flanked on all sides by the savage, beetling peaks marshalled in endless ranks like the spears and unsheathed lances of war-gods in their domain midway between earth and heaven. Out across the death-white pallor of snow, in the death-chill of the ice-fields, we strike out slowly, cautiously, for the surface of the ice, now hidden by snow, is cleft by crevasses even to the mountain's core, and a misstep, a fall into their depths would be doom. Far away over the white stretches, a gaunt, spectral coyote watches our painful progress. On and on we go by a tusk-like peak, the "Little Matterhorn," and ever on to a point where the giant panorama unfolds its mountain-multitudes, its barricaded lakes, and the echo breaks into a chorus that peals out as though each separate crest were possessed of a brazen tongue. These grimly naked heights, split and rent with elemental shocks and the resistance to huge forces, are the cradle of the lightning and the thunder-bolt, the citadel whence the storm-hosts ride down on blackwinged clouds upon the world. And even now phantom troops of clouds come gliding up out of the moist laps of the valleys, out of lakes and streams, passing in shifting wraith-shapes over the mountains, spreading their filmy scarfs across the sky until the livid expanse of snow, showing colourlessly in the grey light, brings to one a vivid picture of the ice-age, of a frozen world and the cold, pitiless illumination of a burnt-out sun.
Gem Lake
Fine, pricking points of snow cut with the sharpness of needle-thrusts; the wind whips through the bleak gaps in the Range and over the glacier, gathering cold and speed as it comes. A chilling numbness deadens our feet and hands. So, wind-buffeted, storm-driven, with the trumpeting gale in our ears, we turn back from the kingdom where Winter is unbroken, and descend through alternate shadow and sun into the blooming beauty, into the golden Summer that swims in the world below, whence snow and cold are only hinted of in a white-breasted, mountain-kissing cloud.
[THE LITTLE SAINT MARY'S]
[CHAPTER IX]
THE LITTLE SAINT MARY'S
PERHAPS the most sublime sweep of view within the entire Range is gained from the summit of Mount Lincoln. To accomplish this ascent it is necessary to leave the tortuous "switch-back" trail in full view of Gunsight Pass and strike out over a trackless mass of shattered rock, upward toward the peak. The way is steep and difficult, the footing slippery and insecure. The muscles strain to quivering tension, the breath comes in gusty sighs and still the mighty heap of dull rose and green rock rears its jagged crest against the throbbing sky. But even if the climb were tenfold longer and the goal tenfold harder to win, it would be a faint-hearted seeker after the beautiful who would hesitate to make the sacrifice of toil for the magnificent reward that awaits him.