could see it through a break in the mountains, rising up straight, bold, and solitary, covered from foot to summit with perpetual snow. The upper part, for perhaps five thousand feet, was a perfect cone, and seems to be composed entirely of ice and snow, the accumulation of ages. The lower part was more precipitous, but steep enough to throw off the snow altogether, while at the base was a great glacier formed by the masses of snow which fell from its sides. It was a magnificent sight, and I could scarcely tear myself away from it." The name K2 has been given to this mountain by the Trigonometrical Survey, waiting the discovery of a native name for it, for this enlightened corps always prefers native names when they can be found. Probably, however, like Mount Everest,[1] it has no name, not being familiar enough to the people to receive one, for both summits can be seen only from almost inaccessible places. The name Peak Godwin-Austen, after the officer who first surveyed the Mustagh Range and glaciers, was proposed for it at this meeting of the Royal Geographical Society.
The thrilling description of the crossing of the Mustagh Pass, where the party reached the height of nineteen thousand feet above the sea, is too long to be quoted here. It simply includes the usual adventures of icy Alpine climbing intensified, and adds no new facts. General Strachey, President of the Geographical Society, remarked, in the discussion of Lieutenant Younghusband's paper, that this pass appeared to be the center of the most wonderful accumulation of glaciers on the face of the earth. Some of them, which Colonel Godwin-Austen described, and which Lieutenant Younghusband must have passed over, were from thirty to forty miles in length, and probably, by passing from one to another, the traveler should be able to go over a glacier surface of seventy or eighty miles.
| SKETCH OF RUDOLF CLAUSIUS. |
THE name of Prof. Clausius—"one of the most brilliant lights of the nineteenth century," as he is called by one of the Vice-Presidents of the British Association—is conspicuously associated, along with those of Rankine and Prof. William Thomson, in the development of the science of thermodynamics, or the demonstration of the mechanical theory of heat; and to him is credited the first placing of the kinetic theory of gases on a secure scientific basis. England and France mourned almost equally with Germany in his death—England, because of his association with the great British
- ↑ The name commonly given as the native name of Mount Everest is not the name of the pinnacle itself, but of one of the satellite peaks by which it is surrounded, and which shut it off from ordinary view.
