AN OCEAN OF AIR. 199 



wonderfully like the one I had pitched upon the day before 

 as being the Mosca Pass. I was certainly on the flank of 

 the summit ridge. 



" Whence I stood I could perceive that the canon we had 

 been so long following became but a rugged furrow up the 

 face of the mountain, and that to retrace our way to a branch 

 of it leading towards the south-west, whose mouth we had 

 passed about a mile back, and try such branch, offered the 

 most promising prospect of success. 



"At 2 o'clock we started, and were soon in the deep 

 narrow ravine I had noticed, and which we travelled toil- 

 somely up for a couple of hours ; its wall to our right 

 getting higher and higher, while the one on our left con- 

 tinued to lessen until it ultimately terminated, and we found 

 ourselves, at last, standing on the steep face of a mountain- 

 summit, which to our right rose with a bold, nearly perpen- 

 dicular sweep towards the sky, and to our left, after extending 

 forty or fifty feet with a slight downward inclination, suddenly 

 curved out of sight. 



" Then came an ocean of air. Its boundary, the sharply 

 serrated horizon line formed by the twin Picachos de Espaila 

 and the snowy peaks extending in a semicircle to their right 

 and left. Its bottom, the lesser mountains, foot-hills, and 

 valleys which lay between us and them, far, far below us, 

 and which the trifling width of the narrow ledge on which 

 we stood sufficed to conceal from our sight. 



" The slight joggle or break along the face of the moun- 

 tain, which formed the natural ramp we were standing on, 

 seemed to be practicable as far as we could see it ; but that 

 was only for a short distance, as a hundred yards in front 



