GLACIER PARK 61 



in the high wind on the summit rock no larger than a 

 good-sized clothes closet and faced the first shock of 

 that prospect, not one of us quoted Omar Khayyam. 

 Not one of us gave expression to an exalted emotion in 

 supposedly fitting words. On the contrary, what each 

 of us said is unfit for print. We swore! Each accord- 

 ing to his capacity, we swore reverently, heartily, 

 though with gasping breath, and the frontiersman was 

 the most expressive. There are moments when formal 

 rhetoric does not seem to fit! 



To our right, on a high shelf of the Divide, hung a 

 small glacier, feeding a white stream which leaped out 

 over the precipice and vanished. Directly under our 

 feet the mountain fell away in a clean drop of at least 

 three thousand feet, so that we lay on our bellies in the 

 high wind, to toss a stone over. Far beneath us, at the 

 bottom of the hole, lay a peaceful green lake. Out of 

 this lake, on the other side, rose the steep debris pile 

 from the sides of Mount Merritt, and then the sheer 

 gray and brown battlements of the mountain itself, so 

 steep that not even a snowfield could cling to them, up, 

 up, to the level of our faces, and then up still another 

 thousand feet to the almost ten thousand-foot castel- 

 lated summit, a mile-long ridge of battlements. No 

 house, no trail, no human thing was visible from this 

 perch only a vast hole into the earth with a sweet 

 green lake at the bottom; only rearing precipices and 

 distant, tumbled peaks and glaciers, and far off the 



