1893 
Before us was the loom of a great dark mass blotting out the stars 
Mount far toward the zenith. As we reached the open slope a chill breeze 
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mowed the air enough to be unpleasant. We plodded slowly along and our 
horses by their frequent stops and hard breathing showed that ws were 
getting well up. Finally a pale gray tinge in the east ever the shoulder 
of a rugged spur of lava showed that the sun was nearing the horizon. 
Then the figures of our men became more distinct." the pale yellow 
bunches of grass could be distinguished about us and the snowy sides of 
the volcano to come out of their enshrouding darkness. The gray east 
threw its cold, pale, mysterious light over the landscape until it had 
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the same dead, ghastly effect that one gets on an Arctic landscape at 
summer midnight when the sky has lost its colors. The high ridge of 
lava with its ragged outline between us and the dawn nm seemed to al¬ 
most overhang us as we toiled along its base. Ahead gleamed out some 
small snow banks the lower ones of their kind. As we reached these 
the stars had been swallowed up by the gray dawn so that only a few 
large ones low down in the west could be seen. Looking back from here, 
it ms evident that the valley-like basin sweeping down from the foot 
of the volcano where we stood, with the scattered boulders, often of 
V 
great size, on the middle of its otherwise unbroken surface, was once 
a glacier bed leading down and ending somewhere neat* our capping place. 
Passing up the old trail of the sulphur gatherers end snow gatherers 
we rounded the upper end of the high comb-like lava ridge and dismounted 
by a huge lava boulder deposited here in the gap by the dying glaciers. 
Other similar boulders were all about but most of them shivered into 
innumerable fragment!;, all with eonchoidal fracture, by the weather. 
The dead gray of the dawn began to be vivified by a saffron hue 
now and as we began to move up the sandy slope leading to the rugged 
line of dark lava up which our couree lay. Soon a warm glow of color 
in 
