68 TRAVELS AMONGST THE GREAT ANDES, chap. hi. 



some distance farther we continued to progress at a reasonable 

 rate, having fine weather and a good deal of sunshine. 



At about 11 a.m. we fancied we saw the Pacific, above the 

 clouds which covered the whole of the intervening flat country ; 

 and shortly afterwards commenced to enter the plateau which is 

 at the top of the mountain, having by this time made half the 

 circuit of the western dome. We were then twenty thousand feet 

 high, and the summits seemed within our grasp. We could see 

 both, — one towards our right, and the other a little farther away 

 on our left, with a hollow plateau about a third of a mile across 

 between them. We reckoned that in another hour we could get 

 to the top of either ; and, not knowing which of the two was the 

 higher, we made for the nearer. But at this point the condition 

 of affairs completely changed. The sky became overclouded, the 

 wind rose, and we entered upon a tract of exceedingly soft snow, 

 which could not be traversed in the ordinary way. The leading 

 man went in up to his neck, almost out of sight, and had to be 

 hauled out by those behind. Imagining that we had got into a 

 labyrinth of crevasses, we beat about right and left to try to 

 extricate ourselves ; and, after discovering that it was everywhere 

 alike, we found the only possible way of proceeding was to flog 

 every yard of it down, and then to crawl over it on all fours ; and, 

 even then, one or another was frequently submerged, and almost 

 disappeared.^ 



Needless to say, time flew rapidly. When we had been at this 

 sort of work for three hours, without having accomplished half the 

 remaining distance, I halted the men, pointed out the gravity of 

 our situation, and asked them which they preferred, to turn or to 

 go on. They talked together in patois, and then Jean-Antoine 



being much rounded and very full of dull glassy enclosures ; there is a fair amount 

 of augite, but no well-characterised hypersthene ; so that the rock may be named 

 an augite-andesite."— Prof. T. G. Bonney, Proc. Royal Soc, June 19, 1884. 



1 Louis Carrel could not touch bottom with a twelve-foot pole that he was 

 carrying. It would have continued to descend by its own weight if he had left 

 hold of it. 



