It was on this Alatna-Kobuk portage that we saw the most magnificent sunrise any of us could remember. It had been cloudy for some days with threat of snow which did not fall. We were camped in a little hollow between two ridges, and I had been busy packing up the stuff in the tent preparatory to the start, when I stepped out with a load of bedding in my arms, right into the midst of the spectacle. It was simple, as the greatest things are always simple, but so gorgeous and splendid that it was startling. The whole southeastern sky was filled with great luminous bands of alternate purple and crimson. At the horizon the bands were deeper in tone and as they rose they grew lighter, but they maintained an unmixed purity of contrasting colour throughout. I gazed at it until the tent was struck and the dogs hitched and it was time to start, and then I had to turn my back upon it, for our course lay due west, and I was breaking trail. But on the crest of the rising ground ahead there burst upon my delighted eyes a still more astonishing prospect. We were come to the first near view of the Kobuk mountains, and the reflected light of that gorgeous sunrise was caught by the flanks of a group of wild and lofty snow peaks, and they stood up incandescent, with a vivid colour that seemed to come through them as well as from them. To right and left, mountains out of the direct path of that light gave a soft dead mauve, but these favoured peaks, bathed from base to summit in clear crimson effulgence, glowed like molten metal. It was not the reflected light of the sun, but of the flaming sky, for even as I looked, a swift change came over them. They passed through the tones of red to lightest pink, not fading but brightening, and before my companions reached me the sun's rays sprang upon the mountains from the horizon, and they were golden. It seems almost foolish to the writer and may well seem tedious to the reader, to attempt in words the description of such scenes; yet so deep is the impression they produce, and so large the place they take in the memory, that to omit them would be to strike out much of the charm and zest of these arctic journeys. Again and again in the years that have passed, the recollection of that pomp of colour on the way to the Kobuk has come suddenly upon me, and always with a bounding of the spirit. I can shut my eyes now and see that incomparable sunrise; I can see again that vision of mountains filling half the sky with their unimaginable ardency, and I think that this world never presented nobler sight. Surely for its pageantry of burning, living colour, for purity and depth and intensity of tint, the Far North with its setting of snow surpasses all other regions of the earth. [Sidenote: TRAVELLING KOBUK LADS]