Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/362

 their way back to their own homes, and were the first white men, not connected with that band of Indians, who had ever ascended to this point. Immense blocks of granite, some of them hundreds of feet high, towered above us, with stunted pine clinging to the scanty soil at their bases; above all loomed the majestic rounded cone of the Cloud Peak, a thousand feet beyond timber line. The number of springs increased so much that it seemed as if the ground were oozing water from every pore; the soil had become a sponge, and travel was both difficult and dangerous; on all sides were lofty banks of snow, often pinkish in tint; the stream in the pass had diminished in breadth, but its volume was unimpaired as its velocity had trebled. At every twenty or thirty feet of horizontal distance there was a cascade of no great height, but so choked up with large fragments of granite that the current, lashed into fury, foamed like milk. The sun's rays were much obscured by the interlacing branches of the majestic spruce and fir trees shading the trail, and the rocky escarpments looming above the timber line. We could still see the little rivulet dancing along, and hear it singing its song of the icy granite peaks, the frozen lakes, and piny solitudes that had watched its birth. The "divide," we began to congratulate ourselves, could not be far off; already the pines had begun to thin out, and the stragglers still lining the path were dwarfed and stunted. Our pretty friend, the mountain brook, like a dying swan, sang most sweetly in its last moments; we saw it issue from icy springs above timber line, and bade it farewell to plunge and flounder across the snow-drifts lining the crest. In this last effort ourselves and animals were almost exhausted. On the "divide" was a lake, not over five hundred yards long, which supplied water to the Big Horn on the west and the Tongue on the east side of the range. Large cakes and floes of black ice, over a foot in thickness, floated on its waters. Each of these was covered deep with snow and re-*gelated] ice.

It was impossible to make camp in this place. There was no timber—nothing but rocks and ice-cold water, which chilled the hands dipped into it. Granite and granite alone could be seen in massy crags, timberless and barren of all trace of vegetation, towering into the clouds, in bold-faced ledges, the home of the mountain sheep; and in cyclopean blocks, covering acres upon acres of