Far away on the southern horizon we detected the heights of Mount Desert, our old familiar haunt.  All the northern semicircle was lost to us by the fog.  We lost also the view of the mountain itself.  All the bleak, lonely, barren, ancient waste of the bare summit was shrouded in cold fog.  The impressive gray ruin and Titanic havoc of a granite mountain top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression, the long stern reaches of sierra, the dark curving slopes channelled and polished by the storms and fine drifting mists of aeons, the downright plunge of precipices, all the savageness of harsh rock, unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically and delusively, as mountain mists will do, and gave us vistas into the upper desolation.  After such momentary rifts the mist thickened again, and swooped forward as if to involve our station, but noon sunshine, reverberated from the plains and valleys and lakes below, was our ally; sunshine checked the overcoming mist, and it stayed overhead, an unwelcome parasol, making our August a chilly November.  Besides what our eyes lost, our minds lost, unless they had imagination enough to create it, the sentiment of triumph and valiant energy that the man of body and soul feels upon the windy heights, the highest, whence he looks far and wide, like a master of realms, and knows that the world is his; and they lost the sentiment of solemn joy that the man of soul recognizes as one of the surest intimations of immortality, stirring within him, whenever he is in the unearthly regions, the higher world.

We stayed studying the pleasant solitude and dreamy breadth of Katahdin’s panorama for a long time, and every moment the mystery of the mist above grew more enticing.  Pride also was awakened.  We turned from sunshine and Cosmos into fog and Chaos.  We made ourselves quite miserable for nought.  We clambered up into Nowhere, into a great, white, ghostly void.  We saw nothing but the rough surfaces we trod.  We pressed along crater-like edges, and all below was filled with mist, troubled and rushing upward like the smoke of a volcano.  Up we went,—­nothing but granite and gray dimness.  Where we arrived we know not.  It was a top, certainly:  that was proved by the fact that there was nothing within sight.  We cannot claim that it was the topmost top; Kimchinjinga might have towered within pistol-shot; popgun-shot was our extremest range of vision, except for one instant, when a kind-hearted sunbeam gave us a vanishing glimpse of a white lake and breadth of forest far in the unknown North toward Canada.