We woke again, chattering with cold, to find it perfectly calm. The morning star was blazing over the spot where day was about to break. The sky was absolutely clear, not a mote on its whole concavity. The wind had swept and burnished it. The mountain towered above us cold and sharp as a crystal. There was a still, solemn majesty about it in the keen air and early light which struck us with a thrill of fear. The light just before daybreak is far more exact than the scarlet splendour of morning or the blinding blaze of noon. The world below us was a level sea of clouds. We seemed to be on an island of snow and rock, or on a small planetoid winging its own way in space. Yet beyond the puncturing top of a few of the Simcoe peaks a wavering line that just touched the glowing eastern sky, told of clear weather a hundred leagues up the basin of the Columbia. Out of the ocean of cloud, the great peaks of Hood and St. Helens rose, cold and white, like icebergs on an Arctic sea. [Illustration: A Typical Mountain Meadow, Stehekin Valley, Wash. Photo. by T. W. Tolman, Spokane.] Coffee, ham, and hardtack, and then out on the ice and snow, just as the first warm flush of morning is gilding the mighty mass above us. The snow, hardened by the freezing morning, affords excellent footing, and in the sharp, bracing air we feel capable of any effort. We gain the summit of a bright red knob, one of the secondary volcanoes that girdle the mountain. At its peak are purple stones piled up like an altar, as indeed it is, though the incense from it is not of human kindling. The sun is not fairly up, but from below the horizon it splits the hemisphere of the sky into a hundred segments by its auroral flashes. And now we begin to climb a volcanic ridge, rising like a huge stairway, with blocks of stone as large as a piano. This is a tongue of lava, very recent, insomuch that it shows no glacial markings, and yet enough soil has accumulated upon it to support vegetation. It can be seen, a dull red river, three hundred yards wide, extending far down the mountain side. How well the old Greek poet described the process that must have taken place here: "AEtna, pillar of heaven, nurse of snow, with fountains of fire; a river of fire, bearing down rocks with a crashing sound to the deep sea." The ridge becomes very steep, at an angle of probably thirty-five or forty degrees, and we climb on all fours from one rock to another. At last we draw ourselves up a huge wedge of phonolite and find ourselves at the summit of the first peak. Six hundred yards beyond, muffled in white silence, rises the great dome. It is probably five hundred feet higher than the first peak. To reach it we climb a bare, steep ridge of shaly, frost-shattered rock, in which we sink ankle deep, a difficult and even painful task with the laboured breathing of twelve thousand feet altitude.