Page:Canadian Alpine Journal I, 2.djvu/40

214 rods, we sat there and ate our lunch. It was a cold eating place; no sun to cheer us, no landscape to repay the toilsome climb, a cold wind blowing, our benumbed feet in a snow-bank, the flakes falling thickly over us. Then we came down.

The weather played us many tricks on the return, sunshine, rain, hail, sleet, fierce winds, snow squalls, in turn and sometimes in conjunction, gave us all the variety we needed to kill monotony. A little way below the summit the clouds blew away from about us and discovered a wide landscape to the east and south. Still farther down the whole mass of clouds would lift at times and we could look under them over the broad Illecillewaet Neve with its ten square miles of pure white, looking from that height as level as a floor. Now and then beyond appeared the mighty mass of Dawson, and further to the right the graceful curves of the Asulkan Pass and Glacier, with a wilderness of nameless ice-clad giants in the west beyond them as far as eye could see.

The most striking sight of all was a brief view that came to us when we were near the base of the main peak. We had just been pelted with a fierce squall of wind and rain and hail. It passed, and we stood in an oasis of sunlight. The lower clouds were gone. To the south a broad band of sunlight lay across the Illecillewaet Névé; the heavy blanket of the upper clouds threw its gloomy shadow on all the world in that quarter save the single peak of Mt. Purity, its perfect cone a brilliant gleaming white in the bright sunlight that transfigured it alone. I tried to catch the scene with my camera, but the result is only a faint suggestion of the majesty and beauty of the original.

Our descent was made by practically the same route as the ascent, but greater caution was necessary for safety; and so we all four went upon one rope. So carefully had we to pick our way, that even with less stops than on the way up, we were more than an hour