60 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



dred miles away. Reason told us it was the Alberta 

 prairie, but the illusion of the sea was too perfect to 

 give reason a voice. 



From this col four of us kept on up the peak, now 

 but a steep naked pyramid of shale stone, with ex- 

 quisite tiny gardens of pink moss campion, mountain 

 saxifrage, mist maidens, rosewort, and other Alpine 

 flowers half hidden in sheltered crannies. We could see 

 nothing but the sky as we climbed, and the rock in our 

 faces. The prospect we sought remained for a climax 

 when the apex was reached. In his address, "In Praise 

 of Omar," John Hay tells how he rose one morning in 

 camp on the summit of the Great Divide and heard a 

 frontiersman quoting: 



' 'Tis but a tent where takes his one day's rest 

 A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest; 

 The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash 

 Strikes, and prepares it for another guest." 



The guide of our party was a frontiersman, a lover of 

 this mountain world, blue-eyed, lean, taciturn, efficient. 

 Another member was a well-known mountaineer and 

 mountain lover, one]of the few men who have ever scaled 

 the north wall of Mount Baker. Another was an 

 eastern artist. The fourth member has known the 

 Rubaiyat by heart for twenty years, and is not un- 

 acquainted with other exalted expressions of emotion. 

 But, as our faces came up over the crest, as we crouched 



