Looking towards the south, along the summit of the mountain, which stretched away for nearly a mile in length, peak rose above peak in colossal proportions from the dazzling expanse of snow. Each grand and towering mass of rock, tinted by the extinct volcanic fires of a reddish hue, standing out clearly defined against the light-blue sky, each pointed summit shining with ice beneath the bright light with grand and almost magical effect. Immediately beneath where we stood was a steep precipice which fell perpendicularly for hundreds of feet below, and beneath this again was a wide circle of jagged rocks, marking the outline of a gigantic crater, filled to its craggy brim with snow, which was furrowed into chasms of enormous depth, the clean-cut sides of which looked white and beautiful in their winding outline. The furthest southern peak of the mountain stood out in grand relief in the distance, its rounded, cupola-shaped summit being perfect in outline, as if artificially fashioned to serve for the dome of a Mohammedan mosque. Turning from the wonders of the mountain, and looking out over the grand expanse of country which stretched far and wide on every side in all its pristine loveliness until it lost itself, as it were, in the wide expanse of ocean, just visible in the distance to the east and west, a wondrous panorama presented itself. Never had I seen a more varied and enchanting scene. I had beheld a wider expanse of country from the summit of the Rocky Mountains, gorges and precipices more stupendous in the valley of the Yosemite, and I had gazed over a land very similar in outline from the summit of Fusiyama in Japan, but never before had I stood upon a glacier-crowned height in the region of perpetual snow with an active volcano, rising thousands of feet, beneath me, nor had I ever beheld so wide an expanse of lake, mountain, and rolling plain mingling together, as it were, and forming one grand and glorious picture. This wondrous Elysium, for in its primeval beauty it looked like nothing else, with its colossal, glacier-scored mountain, had not the cold frigidity of the Alpine districts of the South Island, where Nature looks awful in its grandeur; but here was the mingling, as it were, of the torrid and the frigid zone--a land where the snow-field and the glacier rose in all their impressive sublimity above a romantic-looking country clothed in a semi-tropical vegetation, where the choicest and most varied of trees and plants grew spontaneously in an atmosphere which might rank as the most healthful and invigorating in the world. The sight was, indeed, one calculated to overawe the mind and to impress the imagination with a sense of the omnipotence of the Creator.