We decided to leave the Tucker tent at the 20,000 foot level, together with most of our outfit and provisions.  From here to the top we were to carry only such things as were absolutely necessary.  They included the Mummery tent with pegs and poles, the mountain-mercurial barometer, the two Watkins aneroids, the hypsometer, a pair of Zeiss glasses, two 3A kodaks, six films, a sling psychrometer, a prismatic compass and clinometer, a Stanley pocket level, an eighty-foot red-strand mountain rope, three ice axes, a seven-foot flagpole, an American flag and a Yale flag.  In order to avoid disaster in case of storm, we also carried four of Silver’s self-heating cans of Irish stew and mock-turtle soup, a cake of chocolate, and eight hard-tack, besides raisins and cubes of sugar in our pockets.  Our loads weighed about twenty pounds each.

To our great satisfaction and relief, the weather continued fine and there was very little wind.  On the preceding afternoon the snow had been so soft one frequently went in over one’s knees, but now everything was frozen hard.  We left camp at five o’clock.  It was still dark.  The great dome of Coropuna loomed up on our left, cut off from direct attack by gigantic ice falls.  To reach it we must first surmount the saddle on the main ridge.  From there an apparently unbroken slope extended to the top.  Our progress was distressingly slow, even with the light loads.  When we reached the saddle there came a painful surprise.  To the north of us loomed a great snowy cone, the peak which we had at first noticed from the Chuquibamba Calvario.  Now it actually looked higher than the dome we were about to climb!  From the Sihuas Desert, eighty miles away, the dome had certainly seemed to be the highest point.  So we stuck to our task, although constantly facing the possibility that our painful labors might be in vain and that eventually, this north peak would prove to be higher.  We began to doubt whether we should have strength enough for both.  Loss of sleep, soroche, and lack of appetite were rapidly undermining our endurance.

The last slope had an inclination of thirty degrees.  We should have had to cut steps with our ice axes all the way up had it not been for our snow-creepers, which worked splendidly.  As it was, not more than a dozen or fifteen steps actually had to be cut even in the steepest part.  Tucker was first on the rope, I was second, Coello third, and Gamarra brought up the rear.  We were not a very gay party.  The high altitude was sapping all our ambition.  I found that an occasional lump of sugar acted as the best rapid restorative to sagging spirits.  It was astonishing how quickly the carbon in the sugar was absorbed by the system and came to the relief of smoldering bodily fires.  A single cube gave new strength and vigor for several minutes.  Of course, one could not eat sugar without limit, but it did help to tide over difficult places.