1893 
Mount 
Orizaba 
rounded backs of cumuli in the distance. Looking down through this 
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atmosphere the faint, uncertain details of the larger features of the 
landscape could be made out exactly as one might see the bottom of a 
pond through slightly murky waters. 
Below this limit of 16,000 feet is the place of all earthly life 
in this region, and above it the realm of stars and sun and purity. 
Like snowy islands of an Arctic sea rise the peaks of the 3 mountains 
in a little group. Ho companion peaks pieroe this eea of air until 
one journeys far away to the Andes of South America or high up along 
our northwest coast where a single fellow is found in St, Elias. 
Hare and there over the surface of this dusty sea I began to see 
newly forming cumulus clouds, their upper borders resting along the 
surface of the sea like the foam of breakers on a shoal. At 10 a.m. 
the upward currents of warm air from the plains began to climb along 
the mountain sides and I was disappointed to see ragged gray clouds 
begin to form here and there along the mountain and drive along its 
t 
sides below us as though by their own volition, for the breeze accomp¬ 
anying them had not yet come to effect the air at our altitude. 
These clouds now rapidly multiplied and out on the surfaoe of the 
dusty sea was forming a host of beautiful cumuli. Their upper surfaces 
floating above the smoke rounded and billowy and snowy white but the 
sunken parts softened by the smoke through warm grays to the almost 
blue black under surfaces. Thousands of feet overhead now began to 
form a lace-like filmy gauze of cirrus that could not have been less 
than 25,000 feet in altitude. 
Tffihen we were within a few hundred feet of the top, we left the lines 
of bare lava along which we had been pioking our way and worked over the 
sun-eaten surfaoe of the thin layer of snow that encircles the crest. 
Then the misty cloud fragments that had been chasing one another about 
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