May 14, 1885] 
NATURE 
41 
commenced our slow toil northward with a thermometer at 110° 
in the shade, if any shade there be in the shadeless desert, 
which seemed to be chiefly inhabited by rattlesnakes of an ashen 
gray colour, and a peculiarly venomous bite. There is no water 
save at the rarest intervals, and the soil at a distance seems as 
though strewed with sheets of salt, which aids the delusive show 
of the mirage. These are, in fact, the ancient beds of dried-up 
salt lakes or dead seas, some of them being below the level 
of the ocean ; and such a one on our right, though only about 
twenty miles wide, has earned the name of ‘‘ Death Valley,” 
from the number of human beings who have perished in it. 
Formerly an emigrant train, when emigrants crossed the Con- 
tinent in caravans, had passed through the great Arizona deserts 
in safety until after their half-year’s journey, their eyes were 
gladdened by the snowy peaks of the Sierras looking delusively 
near. The goal of their long toil seemed before them ; only this 
one more valley lay between, and into this they descended, think- 
ing to cross it ina day—but they never crossed it. Afterwards the 
long line of wagons was found with the skeletons of the animals in 
the harness, and by them those of men, women, and little children 
dead of thirst, and some relics of the tragedy remained at the 
time of our journey. I cite this as an indirect evidence of the 
phenomenal dryness of the region—a dryness which, so far, 
served our object, which was, in part, to get rid as much as 
possible of that water-vapour which is so well known to be a 
powerful absorber of the solar heat. 
Everything has an end, and so had that journey, which finally 
brought us to the goal of our long travel, at the foot of the 
highest peak of the Sierras, Mount Whitney, which ruse above 
us in tremendous precipices, that looked hopelessly insurmount- 
able and wonderfully near. The whole savage mountain region 
in its slow rises from the west, and its descent to the desert 
plains in the east, is more like the chain called the Apennines, 
in the moon, than anything I know on the earth. The summits 
are jagged peaks like Alpine ‘‘needles,” looking in the thin air 
so delusively near, that, coming on such ascene unprepared, one 
would almost say they were large grey stones a few fields off, 
with an occasional little white patch on the top, that might be a 
handkerchief or a sheet of paper dropped there. But the 
telescope showed that the seeming stones were of the height of 
many Snowdons piled on one another, and the white patches 
occasional snow-fields, looking how invitingly cool, from the 
torrid heat of the desert, where we were encamped by a little 
rivulet that ran down from some unseen ice-lake in that upper air. 
Here we pitched our tents and fell to work (for you remember 
we must have two stations, a low anda high one, to compare 
the results), and here we laboured three weeks in almost in- 
tolerable heat, the instruments having to be constantly swept 
clear of the red desert dust which the hot wind brought. Close 
by these tents a thermometer covered by a single sheet of glass, 
and surrounded by wool, rose to 237° in the sun, and sometimes 
in the tent, which was darkened for the study of separate rays, 
the heat was xbsolutely beyond human endurance. Finally, our 
apparatus was taken apart and packed in small pieces on the 
backs of ules, who were to carry it bya ten days’ journey 
through the mountains to the other side of the rocky wall which, 
though only ten or twelve miles distant, arose miles above our 
heads ; and, leaving these mule trains to go with the escort by this 
longer route, I started with a guide by a nearer way to those 
white gleams in the upper skies, that had daily tantalised us 
below in the desert with suggestions of delicious, unattainable 
cold. That desert sun had tanned our faces to a leather-like 
brown, and the change to the cooler air as we ascended was at 
first delightful. At an altitude of 5000 feet we came to a 
wretched band of nearly naked savages, crouched around their 
camp-fire, and at 6000 found the first scattered trees ; and here 
the feeble suggestion of a path stopped, and we descended a 
ravine to the bed of a mountain stream, up which we forced our 
way, cutting through the fallen trees with an axe, fighting for 
every foot of advance, and finally pas-ing what seemed impass- 
able. It was interesting to speculate as to the fate of our 
siderostat mirrors and other precious freight, now somewhere 
on asimilar road, but quite useless. We were committed now, 
and had to make the best of it—and, besides, I had begun to 
have my attention directed to a more personal subject. This 
was, that the colder it grew the more the sun burnt the skin— 
quite literally burnt, I may say, so that by the end of the third 
day my face and hands, case-hardened, as I thought, in the 
desert, began to look as if they had been seared with red-hot 
irons, here in the cold where the thermometer had fallen to 
freezing at night ; and still as we ascended the paradoxical effect 
increased: the colder it grew about us, the hotter the sun blazed 
above. 
We have all heard probably of this curious effect of burning in 
the midst of cold, and some of us may have experienced it in the 
Alps, where it may be aided by reflection from the snow, which 
we did not have about us at any time except in scattered patches, 
but here by the end of the fourth day my face was scarcely 
recognisable, and it almost seemed as though sunbeams up here 
were different things, and contained something which the air 
filters out before they reach us in our customary abodes. Radia- 
tion here is increased by the absence of water vapour too, and on 
the whole this intimate personal experience fell in almost too 
well with our anticipations that the air is an even more elaborate 
trap to catch the sunbeams than had been surmised, and that this 
effect of selective absorption and radiation was intimately con- 
nected with that change of the primal energies and primal colour 
of the sun which we had climbed towards it to study. 
On the fourth day, after break-neck ascents and descents, we 
finally ascended by a ravine, down which leaped a cataract, till, 
at nightfall, we reached our upper camp, which was pitched by a 
little lake, one of the sources of the water-fall, at a height of 
about 12,000 feet, but where we seemed in the bottom of a valley, 
nearly surrounded as we were by an amphitheatre of rocky walls 
which rose perpendicularly to the height of Gibraltar from the 
sea, and cut off all view of the desert below or even of the peak 
above us. 
The air was wonderfully clear, so that the sun set in a yellow 
rather than an orange sky, which was reflected in the little ice- 
rimmed lakes and from occasional snow-fields on the distant 
waste of lonely mountain summits on the west. 
The mule train sent off before by another route, had not arrived 
when we got to the mountain camp, and we realised that we 
were far from the appliances of civilisation by our inability to 
learn about our chief apparatus, for here, without post or tele- 
graph, we were as completely cut off from all knowledge of 
what might be going on with it in the next mountain ravine 
as a ship at sea is of the fate of a vessel that sailed before from 
the same port. During the enforced idleness we ascended the peak 
nearly 3000 feet above us, with our lighter apparatus, leaving the 
question of the ultimate use of the heavy ones to be settled 
later. There seemed little prospect of carrying it up, as ‘we 
climbed where the granite walls had been split by the earth- 
quakes, letting a stream of great rocks, like a stone river, flow 
down through the interstices by which we ascended, and, in 
fact, the heavier apparatus was not carried above the mountain 
camp. 
The view from the very summit was over numberless peaks 
on the west to an horizon fifty miles away, of unknown moun- 
tain-tops, for, with the exception of the vast ridge of Mount 
Tyndall, and one or two less conspicuous ones, these summits 
are not known to fame, and, wonderful as the view may be, all 
the charm of association with human interest which we find in 
the mountain landscape of older lands is here lacking. 
It was impossible not to be impressed with the savage soli- 
tude of this desert of the upper air, and our remoteness from 
man and his works, but I turned to the study of the special 
things connected with my mission. Down far below the air 
seemed filled with reddish dust that looked like an ocean. This 
dust is really present everywhere (I have found it in the clear air 
of Etna), and though we do not realise its presence in looking up 
through it, to one who looks down on it, the dwellers on the 
earth seem indeed like creatures at the bottom of a troubled 
ocean. We had certainly risen towards the surface, for about 
us the air was of exquisite purity, and above us the sky was of 
such a deep violet blue, as I have never seen in Egypt or Sicily, 
and yet even this was not absolutely pure, for separately in- 
visible, the existence of fine particles could yet be inferred from 
their action on the light near the sun’s edge, so that even here 
we had not got absolutely above that dust shell which seems to 
encircle our whole planet. But we certainly felt ourselves not 
only in an upper, but a different region. We were on the 
ridge of the continent, and the winds which tore by had little in 
common with the air below, and were bearing past us (accord- 
ing to the geologists) dust which had once formed part of the 
soil of China, and been carried across the Pacific Ocean ; for 
here we were lifted into the great encircling currents of the 
globe, and, ‘‘near to the sun in lonely lands,” were in the right 
conditions to study the differences between his rays at the surface 
and at the bottom of that turbid sea where we had left the rest 
of mankind. We descended the peak and hailed with joy the 
first arrival of our mule trains with the requisite apparatus at the 
