Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear, which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.
It was bitterly chill--the start in the early morning--after a breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he had been up it.
'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.
'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there was silver and lead there.'
The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend { 230} getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily they fell--and rolled--softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just in time.
For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains. I had heard that phrase--a sea of mountains--applied to the Rockies before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
[Illustration: A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.]
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment when they had stormed the sky.