'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there was silver and lead there.'
The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily they fell—and rolled—softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just in time.
For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains. I had heard that phrase—a sea of mountains—applied to the Rockies before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment when they had stormed the sky.
For just five minutes we gazed, and then a mist settled down on them, and, where we were, immediately a bitter wind began to blow and caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As we rode down the frozen trail we startled some ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered above the snow like big white butterflies.