I took the photographic apparatus, and in the course of an hour and an half succeeded in climbing up the central moraine about two miles towards the foot of the great ice fall; but by that time I was tired out and dripping with perspiration. I passed many wide crevasses into which were running streams of water from the surface of the glacier; and judging from the duration of the sound made by stones that I dropped into some of them, they must have had a depth of a hundred feet, perhaps much more. This was only one of eleven glaciers that I counted from the summit of the high ridge which divides the water-shed of the Írtish from that of the Ob. Seven glaciers descend from the two main peaks alone.
We spent all the remainder of the day in sketching, taking photographs, and climbing about the glacier and the valley, and late in the afternoon returned to our camp in the valley of the White Berél. That night—the 2d of August—was even colder than the preceding one. Ice formed to the thickness of more than a quarter of an inch in our tea-kettle, and my blankets and pillow, when I got up in the morning, were covered with thick white frost.
Monday we made another excursion to the summit of the ridge that overlooks the valley of the Katún, and succeeded in getting a good photograph of the two big peaks, against a background of cloudless sky. Our little instrument, of course, could not take in a quarter of the mighty landscape, and what it did take in it reduced to so small a scale that all of the grandeur and majesty of the mountains was lost; but it was a satisfaction to feel that we could carry away something that would suggest and recall to us in later years the sublimity of that wonderful alpine picture.
Monday noon we broke camp and started for the Rakmánofski hot springs; and on the 5th of August, after an absence of ten days, we returned to the Altái Station.
