The party skirted Mount Washburn on the twenty-ninth and spontaneously named it for their honored leader, because he was the first to climb its summit. Said Washburn, “I saw the canyon and the lake. There are unmistakable columns of steam in the distance. This is a glorious region.” Whereupon the entire party hustled upward, frightening the resentful bighorn en route. Upon reaching the summit silence prevailed while these subdued men paid unconscious tribute to the Powers That Be. Standing there upon a natural observatory, they looked down upon the whole grand panorama, as does yonder eagle. Their vision darted a hundred miles southward, where the Tetons glittered like purple icebergs. Then nearer they beheld Lake Titicaca’s only rival, shimmering in the sun. Lake Yellowstone’s deeply sinuous shores, scattered islands, and fingerlike peninsulas gave it a mystic character. Now their gaze followed the Yellowstone River crooking away from the lake and then whirling toward them flashing in its canyon cameo until it seemed to be biting at their very feet. From this central apex the whole mountain-girt plateau conformed to the shape of a mammoth saucer as its distant rim merged with the sky. Another day found them standing on the brink of an imprisoned river’s chasm, enchanted by the ponderous roaring of the awful force below. So vast were the canyon’s alternating gulfs and monoliths that lofty pines “dwindle to shrubs in the dizziness of distance!” Bald eagles far below screamed in angry protest upon this invasion of their secret eyries. Fishhawks hovered cautiously above, less fearful of new dangers than old. Nineteen lonely men stood amazed by an environment at once both grand and gloomy, mellow and terrible, an “empire of shadows and turmoil.”[126] Then the sun came out and the whole gorge flamed! They beheld the marvelously variegated volcanic coloring as vivid and broken as the field of a kaleidoscope. It was as though rainbows had fallen from the sky and draped themselves like glorious banners upon the chasm below. How did it all come about? All nature’s forces conspired to build this temple to her glory. The smooth, sharp tongue of glacial ice first plowed the great furrow deep into the bosom of the earth. Volcanic fires subdued the rigid hardness of the riven rock. Steam from boiling springs tempered to plastic yielding the surface of massive stone. And wind and water came with all their energies and skill to carve and sculpture it to befitting shapes. The air brought all its magic alchemy to bear upon the ingredients of the rock to call thence the gorgeous pigments for its coloring.[127]