We ourselves are going westward now, rather than north-west, and the sun beckons us. For the mountain we are now setting out to reach has been called by the Indians “Going-to-the-Sun.” It stands over and beyond St. Mary’s Lake and climbs heavenward in gigantic steps of stone. It steps from the forest to the rocks, from the rocks to the snow, from the snow to the sky. It is a mighty cathedral, standing in the midst of prosaic mountains, surely one of the most beautiful and majestic of these mountains, symbolic in its shape and its ancient name. We have slept on the mossy earth at the foot of the pines. We will arise and go to the sun. [Illustration] _There’s some one calling you: Arise, sleepy-head, Arise from your bed! A messenger is peeping, There where you’re sleeping: For the day’s been begun By your master the sun, And you surely will follow._ [Illustration: CROSSING THE GREAT DIVIDE] XIII. CLIMBING RED EAGLE WE journeyed through the primeval forest without a trail to guide us, through the jagged, thorny, tumultuous pine wilderness. It was not so easy for Lindsay, whose legs are shorter than mine, but he took it as a game of banter leader and moved forward doggedly into the openings I made. We were glad to take advantage of the thousands of wind-smitten trees which lay dead, piled at every angle and piled on one another. We climbed upward for miles on the white, smooth, dead timber of fallen trees, balancing and jumping, transferring from trunk to trunk, and clambering over the immense stars of upturned roots. We were rewarded at length by a view of the rocks above the tree line and of a tumbling cascade. This was in the direction we required and we made for it and lunched by the cascade become rivulet, and then climbed all the afternoon by rock stairs to the snow. At six beside a “bride-veil waterfall,” we had supper. Above us was an amphitheatre of red rocks and ruined slate and it seemed but a small climb to the top of the mountain. The gradient was steep and there were large quantities of loose stones. We climbed without intermittence until 9 o’clock at night, and as one top was nearly conquered another top seemed to be added. The amphitheatre receded upward to heaven. How arduous it was and at times how risky! Massive stones on which we relied to place our feet proved to be only passengers like ourselves upon the mountain and at a touch from us resumed their downward track, clashing and smashing from rock to rock. We came to steep banks of shale which moved _en masse_ with the weight of our bodies and we lay flat on them and slid with them unwillingly and fearfully. Nevertheless we did make great progress upward, and if we did not conquer the mountain on which we were we at least conquered some peaks that were behind us. We entered the society of the mountains. The mighty eminences and august personalities of the southward view came into our ken. * * * * *