Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/675

Rh invitingly cool, from the torrid heat of the desert, where we were encamped by a little rivulet that ran down from some unseen ice-lake in that upper air. Here we pitched our tents and fell to work (for you remember we must have two stations, a low and a high one, to compare the results), and here we labored three weeks in almost intolerable heat, the instruments having to be constantly swept clear of the red desert dust which the hot wind brought. Close by these tents a thermometer covered by a single sheet of glass, and surrounded by wool, rose to 237° in the sun, and sometimes in the tent, which was darkened for the study of separate rays, the heat was absolutely beyond human endurance. Finally, our apparatus was taken apart and packed in small pieces on the backs of mules, who were to carry it by a ten days' journey through the mountains to the other side of the rocky wall which, though only ten or twelve miles distant, arose miles above our heads; and, leaving these mule-trains to go with the escort by this longer route, I started with a guide by a nearer way to those white gleams in the upper skies, that had daily tantalized us below in the desert with suggestions of delicious, unattainable cold. That desert sun had tanned our faces to a leather-like brown, and the change to the cooler air as we ascended was at first delightful. At an altitude of five thousand feet we came to a wretched band of nearly naked savages, crouched around their camp-fire, and at six thousand found the first scattered trees; and here the feeble suggestion of a path stopped, and we descended a ravine to the bed of a mountain-stream, up which we forced our way, cutting through the fallen trees with an axe, fighting for every foot of advance, and finally passing what seemed impassable. It was interesting to speculate as to the fate of our siderostat mirrors and other precious freight, now somewhere on a similar road, but quite useless. We were committed now, and had to make the best of—it and, besides, I had begun to have my attention directed to a more personal subject. This was that the colder it grew the more the sun burned the skin—quite literally burned I may say, so that by the end of the third day my face and hands, case-hardened, as I thought, in the desert, began to look as if they had been seared with red-hot irons, here in the cold where the thermometer had fallen to freezing at night; and still as we ascended the paradoxical effect increased; the colder it grew about us, the hotter the sun blazed above.

We have all heard probably of this curious effect of burning in the midst of cold, and some of us may have experienced it in the Alps, where it may be aided by reflection from the snow, which we did not have about us at any time except in scattered patches, but here by the end of the fourth day my face was scarcely recognizable, and it almost seemed as though sunbeams up here were different things, and contained something which the air filters out before they reach us in our customary abodes. Radiation here is increased by the absence of water vapor too, and on the whole this intimate personal experience