At First The Cliffs Were Beaten With Hail, Every Stone Of Which, As
Far As I Could See, Was Regular
In form, six-sided pyramids with
rounded base, rich and sumptuous-looking, and fashioned with loving
care, yet seemingly thrown
Away on those desolate crags down which
they went rolling, falling, sliding in a network of curious streams.
After we had forced our way down the ridge and past the group of
hissing fumaroles, the storm became inconceivably violent. The
thermometer fell 22 degrees in a few minutes, and soon dropped below
zero. The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night.
The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged
amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the
gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and
appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke
following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the
mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old
volcano were breaking forth again.
Could we at once have begun to descend the snow slopes leading to the
timber, we might have made good our escape, however dark and wild the
storm. As it was, we had first to make our way along a dangerous
ridge nearly a mile and a half long, flanked in many places by steep
ice-slopes at the head of the Whitney Glacier on one side and by
shattered precipices on the other. Apprehensive of this coming
darkness, I had taken the precaution, when the storm began, to make
the most dangerous points clear to my mind, and to mark their
relations with reference to the direction of the wind.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 59 of 304
Words from 15891 to 16176
of 82482
