These afforded good footholds, but the surface
curved more and more steeply at the head, and the pits became shallower
and less abundant, until I found myself in danger of being shed off like
avalanching snow. I persisted, however, creeping on all fours, and
shuffling up the smoothest places on my back, as I had often done on
burnished granite, until, after slipping several times, I was compelled
to retrace my course to the bottom, and make my way around the west end
of the lake, and thence up to the summit of the divide between the head
waters of Rush Creek and the northernmost tributaries of the San
Joaquin.
Arriving on the summit of this dividing crest, one of the most exciting
pieces of pure wilderness was disclosed that I ever discovered in all my
mountaineering. There, immediately in front, loomed the majestic mass of
Mount Ritter, with a glacier swooping down its face nearly to my feet,
then curving westward and pouring its frozen flood into a dark blue
lake, whose shores were bound with precipices of crystalline snow; while
a deep chasm drawn between the divide and the glacier separated the
massive picture from everything else. I could see only the one sublime
mountain, the one glacier, the one lake; the whole veiled with one blue
shadow--rock, ice, and water close together without a single leaf or
sign of life.
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