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��harness, and by Ihem tliosc of nien, woioen, and IJtLlo cbtlilren, ileail ot thirst; ani1sonier«tic3i>flhe tragedy remaineil at the time of our journey. I cite tliia as an iiiillrect evidence of tUe plienomenal dryness of the region, — a dryaesi which bo far served our ob- ject, which was, in part, toget rid, as much as possible, of that water-vapor which is so well known to be a pawerful absorber of the solar he^t.
Every thing has an end; and so had that journey, which finally brought us to the goal of our long travel at the toot uf the highest peak of the Sierras, Mount Whitney, wbich rose above us in tremendous preci- pices that looked hopelessly insurmountable and wonderfully near. Tbe whole savage mountain region, In Its slow rises from llie west, and its descent lothe desert plains In the east, is more like the chain called Ibe Apennines, In the moon, than any thing I know on ibe earth. The summits are jagged peaks, like Alpine ' needles,' looking in the Ibin air so delu- sively near, that, coming on such a scene unprepared, one would almost say they were large gray stones a few Belds oC, with an occasional little white patch on tbe top that might be a bandkercblef or a sheet of paper dropped there. But the telescope showed that the seeming stones were of the height of many Snow- dons piled on one another, and the white patches occasional snow-fields, looking bow Invillngty cool from the torrid beat of the dasert, where we were en- camped by a little rivulet that ran down from some unaeen ice-Uke in that upper air. Here we pitched our lenls, and fell to work (for you remember we must have two stations, a low and a high one, to com- pare the results); and liere we labored three weeks in almost intolerable heat, the Instruments having to be constantly swept clear of the red desert dust which the hoi wind brought. Close by these tents, a ther- mometer covered by a single sheet of glass, and surrounded by wool, rose to 237° in the suu; and sometimes In the tent, which was darkened for the study of separate rays, the heat was absolutely l>e- yond human endurance. Finally, our apparatus was taken apart, and packed in small pieces on the backs of mules, who were lo carry it by a ten-days' journey through the raouniaina to the other side of the rocky wall, whlcli, though only ten or twelve miles distant, arose miles above our heads; and, leaving these mule- trains to go with the escort by this longer route, I started with a guide by a nearer wuy to those white gleams in the upper skUs that had daily tantalized us below In the desert with suggestions of delicious, unattainable cold. That desert sun bad tanned our faces to a leather-like brown, and the change to the cooler air as we ascended was at flrst delightful. At an altitude of five thousand feet we came to a wretched band of nearly naked savages, crouched around iheir camp-lire, and at six thousand found llic first scattered trees; and here the feeble sugges- tion of a path stopped, and we descended a ravine to tbe ))ed of a mountain stream, up which we forced our way, cutting through llie fallen trees with an axe, fighting for every foot of advance, and finally passing what seemed Impassable, It was interesting to spec- ulate as to the fale of our sidcrostat mirrors and uUier
��precious freight, now somewhere on a similar road, but quite useleas. We were committed now, and had to make the best of it ; and, l^esides, I had begun to have my altenilon directed lo a more personal sub- jecL This was, that the colder it grew, ihe more the sun burnt the skin — quite literally burnt, I may say; so that by the end of the third day my face and bands, case-hardened, as I thought, in the desert, began to look as if they bad been seared with red-hot irons, here in the cold, where the thermometer had fallen to freezing at night ; and still, as we ascended, the para- doxical effect increased. The colder It grew about us, tbe hotter the sun blaied above. We have all heard, probably, of this curious eSect uf burning In the midst of cold, and some of us may have experienced it in the Alps, where it may be aided by reflection from the snow, which we did not have about us at any time except in scattered patches; bat here, by theend o( the fourth day, my face was scarcely recoguir.able, and it almost seemed as though sunbeams up here were different things, and contained something which tbe air filters out before they reach us in our custom- ary abodes. Radiation here is increased by the ab- sence of water-vapor, too; and, on the whole, this intimate personal experience fell in almost too well with our anticipations that the air is an even more elaborate trap to catch the sunbeams than bad been surmised, and that this effect of selective absorption anil radiation was intimately connected with that change of the primal energies and primal color of the sun which we had climbed towards it to study.
On the fourth day, after break-neck ascents and descents, we finally ascended by a ravine down which leaped a cataract, till, at nightfall, we reached our upper camp, which was pitched by a little lake, one of the sources of the waterfall, at a height of about twelve thousand feet, but where we seemed in the bottom of a valley, nearly surrounded as we were by an amphitheatre of rocky walls which rose perpen- dicularly to the height of Gibraltar from the sea, and cut off all view of the desert below, or even of the peak above us. Tbe air was wonderfully clear; so that the sun set In a yellow rather than an orange sky, which was reffected in the little ice-rimmed lakes, and from occasional snow-fields on the distant wast« of lonely mountain summits on the west.
The mule-train, sent off before by another route, had not arrived when we got to the mountain camp, and we reallited that we were far from the appliances of civilization by our inability to learn about our chief apparatus; for here, without post or telegraph, we were as completely cut off from all knowledge of what mtgbt be going on with It in the next monn tain ravine as a ship at sea is of Ibe fate of a vessel tbst sailed before from the same port. During the en- forced idleness, we ascended the peak nearly three thousand feet above u*, with our lighter apparatus, leaving the question of the ultimate use of the heavy ones to be settled later. There seemed little prositect of carrying it up, as we cllrobed where the granite walls ha<l been split by the earthquakes, letting a stream of great rocks, like a stone river. Sow down through the interstices by which we ascended; and.
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