He opened the book, at a place marked with a strip of paper, and read from it the following: "August 24th, 10 p.m.--At last we are on the mountain. And how can I set it down--this thing that has happened? What I write here must be inadequate indeed, but I shall not worry about that, for a hundred years could never dim the memory of what I saw. I have often wondered why the Indians were afraid of Rainier; I know now. And what do I really know? I know what I saw, I know what happened; but only God in Heaven knows what it means. "Got started early. Still following the river. Going very difficult. Crossed stream a number of times and once had to take to the woods. Reached the glacier about three o'clock--an enormous wall of dirty ice, four or five hundred feet in height, with the Nisqually flowing right out of it. Day had turned dark and threatening. Climbed the eastern wall of the cañon. Clouds suddenly settled down--a fog cold and thick and dripping--and we made camp by a tiny stream, near the edge of the cañon cut by the glacier. Soon had a good fire burning. And it was not long before it came--the shrouded figure and with it that horrible shape, 'if,' as old Milton has it in _Paradise Lost_, 'shape it might be called that shape had none.' "At times the fog would settle down so thick we could see no farther than fifty feet. Then suddenly objects could be made out two or three hundred feet away. At the moment the fog was about us thicker than ever. We were sitting by the fire, warming ourselves and talking--White, Long and myself. All at once there was an exclamation. I looked at Long, and what I saw on his face and in his eyes brought me to my feet in an instant and whirled my look up in that direction in which he was staring. "And there on the top of the bank, not more than thirty feet from us, stood a tall, white, shrouded figure, a female figure, and beside it, seemingly squatting like a monstrous toad, was that dark shape that had no shape. But, though shape it had none, it had eyes--big eyes that burned at us with a greenish, hellish fire. "White snatched up his rifle and thrust it forward, but I stepped over and shoved the muzzle aside. When we looked up there again, the woman, for a woman, a white woman too, it certainly was--well, she was gone, and with her that formless thing with the hellish fire in its big eyes. "'What was it?' exclaimed White. "He rubbed his eyes and stared up there again, then this way and that, all about into the thick vapor. "'Was it only a dream?' "'It was real enough,' I told him. 'It was a woman, a white woman.' "'Or,' put in Long, 'the spirit of one.' "'I know one thing,' said White: 'she may be a flesh-and-blood creature, and she may be a spirit; but that thing that crouched there beside her was not of this world of ours!' "He shuddered. "'Not of this world of ours! Men, what _was_ that thing?' "That, of course, was a question that neither Long nor myself could answer.