Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/680

660, but the formidable descent and the ensuing desert journey were before us, and certainly the reign of perpetual winter around us grew as hard to bear as the heats of the desert summer had been. On September 10th we sent our instruments and the escort back by the former route, and, ourselves unencumbered, started on the adventurous descent of the eastern precipices by a downward climb, which, if successful, would carry us to the plains in a single day. I at least shall never forget that day, nor the scenery of more than Alpine grandeur which we passed in our descent, after first climbing by frozen lakes in the northern shadow of the great peak, till we crossed the eastern ridges, through a door so narrow that only one could pass it at a time, by clinging with hands and feet as he swung round the shoulder of the rocks—to find that he had passed in a single minute from the view of winter to summer, the prospect of the snowy peaks behind shut out, and instantly exchanged for that below of the glowing valley and the little oasis where the tents of the lower camp were still pitched, the tents themselves invisible, but the oasis looking like a green scarf dropped on the broad floor of the desert. We climbed still downward by scenery unique in my recollection. This view of the ravine on the screen is little more than a memorandum made by one of the party in a few minutes' halt part-way down, as we followed the ice-stream between the tremendous walls of the defile which rose two thousand feet, and between which we still descended, till, toward night, the ice-brook had grown into a mountain-torrent, and, looking up the long vista of our day's descent, we saw it terminated by the Peak of Whitney, once more lonely in the fading light of the upper sky.

This site, in some respects unequaled for a physical observatory, is likely, I am glad to say, to be utilized, the President of the United States having, on the proper representation of its value to science, ordered the reservation for such purposes of an area of one hundred square miles about and inclusive of Mount Whitney.

There is little more to add about the journey back to civilization, where we began to gather the results of our observation, and to reduce them—to smelt, so to speak, the metal from the ore we had brought home—a slow but necessary process, which has occupied a large part of two years.

The results stated in the broadest way mean that the sun is blue—but mean a great deal more than that; this blueness in itself being perhaps a curious fact only, but, in what it implies, of practical moment.

We deduce in connection with it a new value of the solar heat, so far altering the old estimates that we now find it capable of melting a shell of ice sixty yards thick annually over the whole earth, or, what may seem more intelligible on its practical bearings, of exerting over one horse-power for each square yard of the normally exposed surface. We have studied the distribution of this heat in a spectrum whose limits on the normal scale our explorations have carried to an extent