Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/677

Rh troubled ocean. We had certainly risen toward the surface, for about us the air was of exquisite purity, and above us the sky was of such a deep violet blue as I have never seen in Egypt or Sicily, and yet even this was not absolutely pure, for, separately invisible, the existence of fine particles could yet be inferred from their action on the light near the sun's edge, so that even here we had not got absolutely above that dust-shell which seems to encircle our whole planet. But we certainly felt ourselves not only in an upper, but a different region. We were on the ridge of the continent, and the winds which tore by had little in common with the air below, and were bearing past us (according to the geologists) dust which had once formed part of the soil of China, and been carried across the Pacific Ocean; for here we were lifted into the great encircling currents of the globe, and, "near to the sun in lonely lands," were in the right conditions to study the differences between his rays at the surface and at the bottom of that turbid sea where we had left the rest of mankind. We descended the peak and hailed with joy the first arrival of our mule-trains with the requisite apparatus at the mountain-camp, and found that it had suffered less than might be expected, considering the pathless character of the wilderness. We went to work to build piers and mount telescopes and siderostats, in the scene shown by the next illustration on the screen, taken from a sketch of my own, where these rocks in the immediate foreground rise to thrice the height of St. Paul's. We suffered from cold (the ice forming three inches deep in the tents at night) and from mountain-sickness, but we were too busy to pay much attention to bodily comfort, and worked with desperate energy to utilize the remaining autumn days, which were all too short.

Here, as below, the sunlight entered a darkened tent, and was spread into a spectrum, which was explored throughout by the bolometer, measuring, on the same separate rays which we had studied below in the desert, all of which were different up here, all having grown stronger, but in very different proportions. On the screen is the spectrum as seen in the desert, drawn on a conventional scale, neither prismatic nor normal, but such that the intensity of the energy shall be the same in each part, as it is represented here by these equal perpendiculars in every color. Fix your attention on these three as types, and you will see better what we found on the mountain, and what we inferred as to the state of things still higher up, at the surface of the aërial sea.

You will obtain, perhaps, a clearer idea, however, from the following statement, where I use, not the exact figures used in calculation, but round numbers, to illustrate the process employed. I may premise that the visible spectrum extends from H (in the extreme blue) to A (in the deepest red), or from near 40 (the ray of of a millimetre in wave-length) to near 80. All below 80, to the right, is the invisible infra-red spectrum.