were the two conspicuous objects; in the west, Mt.  Graham and Double Top, about three thousand eight hundred feet each, arrested the eye; while in our front to the north we looked over the top of Panther Mountain to the multitudinous peaks of the northern Catskills.  All was mountain and forest on every hand.  Civilization seemed to have done little more than to have scratched this rough, shaggy surface of the earth here and there.  In any such view, the wild, the aboriginal, the geographical greatly predominate.  The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out.  Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth’s surface.  You discover with a feeling of surprise that the great thing is the earth itself, which stretches away on every hand so far beyond your ken.

The Arabs believe that the mountains steady the earth and hold it together; but they have only to get on the top of a high one to see how insignificant mountains are, and how adequate the earth looks to get along without them.  To the imaginative Oriental people, mountains seemed to mean much more than they do to us.  They were sacred; they were the abodes of their divinities.  They offered their sacrifices upon them.  In the Bible, mountains are used as a symbol of that which is great and holy.  Jerusalem is spoken of as a holy mountain.  The Syrians were beaten by the Children of Israel because, said they, “their gods are gods of the hills; therefore were they stronger than we.”  It was on Mount Horeb that God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and on Sinai that He delivered to him the law.  Josephus says that the Hebrew shepherds never pasture their flocks on Sinai, believing it to be the abode of Jehovah.  The solitude of mountain-tops is peculiarly impressive, and it is certainly easier to believe the Deity appeared in a burning bush there than in the valley below.  When the clouds of heaven, too, come down and envelop the top of the mountain,—­how such a circumstance must have impressed the old God-fearing Hebrews!  Moses knew well how to surround the law with the pomp and circumstance that would inspire the deepest awe and reverence.

But when the clouds came down and enveloped us on Slide Mountain, the grandeur, the solemnity, were gone in a twinkling; the portentous-looking clouds proved to be nothing but base fog that wet us and extinguished the world for us.  How tame, and prosy, and humdrum the scene instantly became!  But when the fog lifted, and we looked from under it as from under a just-raised lid, and the eye plunged again like an escaped bird into those vast gulfs of space that opened at our feet, the feeling of grandeur and solemnity quickly came back.

The first want we felt on the top of Slide, after we had got some rest, was a want of water.  Several of us cast about, right and left, but no sign of water was found.  But water must be had, so we all started off deliberately to hunt it up.  We had not gone many hundred yards before we chanced upon an ice-cave beneath some rocks,—­vast masses of ice, with crystal pools of water near.  This was good luck, indeed, and put a new and a brighter face on the situation.