Every One Of These Parks, Great And Small, Is
A Garden Filled Knee-Deep With Fresh, Lovely Flowers Of Every Hue, The
Most Luxuriant And The Most Extravagantly Beautiful Of All The Alpine
Gardens I Ever Beheld In All My Mountain-Top Wanderings.
We arrived at the Cloud Camp at noon, but no clouds were in sight,
save a few gauzy ornamental wreaths adrift in the sunshine.
Out of
the forest at last there stood the mountain, wholly unveiled, awful in
bulk and majesty, filling all the view like a separate, new-born
world, yet withal so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the
dullest observer to desperate enthusiasm. Long we gazed in silent
admiration, buried in tall daisies and anemones by the side of a
snowbank. Higher we could not go with the animals and find food for
them and wood for our own campfires, for just beyond this lies the
region of ice, with only here and there an open spot on the ridges in
the midst of the ice, with dwarf alpine plants, such as saxifrages and
drabas, which reach far up between the glaciers, and low mats of the
beautiful bryanthus, while back of us were the gardens and abundance
of everything that heart could wish. Here we lay all the afternoon,
considering the lilies and the lines of the mountains with reference
to a way to the summit.
At noon next day we left camp and began our long climb. We were in
light marching order, save one who pluckily determined to carry his
camera to the summit.
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