After we had forced our way down the ridge and past the group of hissing fumaroles, the storm became inconceivably violent.  The thermometer fell 22 degrees in a few minutes, and soon dropped below zero.  The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night.  The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old volcano were breaking forth again.

Could we at once have begun to descend the snow slopes leading to the timber, we might have made good our escape, however dark and wild the storm.  As it was, we had first to make our way along a dangerous ridge nearly a mile and a half long, flanked in many places by steep ice-slopes at the head of the Whitney Glacier on one side and by shattered precipices on the other.  Apprehensive of this coming darkness, I had taken the precaution, when the storm began, to make the most dangerous points clear to my mind, and to mark their relations with reference to the direction of the wind.  When, therefore, the darkness came on, and the bewildering drift, I felt confident that we could force our way through it with no other guidance.  After passing the “Hot Springs” I halted in the lee of a lava-block to let Jerome, who had fallen a little behind, come up.  Here he opened a council in which, under circumstances sufficiently exciting but without evincing any bewilderment, he maintained, in opposition to my views, that it was impossible to proceed.  He firmly refused to make the venture to find the camp, while I, aware of the dangers that would necessarily attend our efforts, and conscious of being the cause of his present peril, decided not to leave him.

Our discussions ended, Jerome made a dash from the shelter of the lava-block and began forcing his way back against the wind to the “Hot Springs,” wavering and struggling to resist being carried away, as if he were fording a rapid stream.  After waiting and watching in vain for some flaw in the storm that might be urged as a new argument in favor of attempting the descent, I was compelled to follow.  “Here,” said Jerome, as we shivered in the midst of the hissing, sputtering fumaroles, “we shall be safe from frost.”  “Yes,” said I, “we can lie in this mud and steam and sludge, warm at least on one side; but how can we protect our lungs from the acid gases, and how, after our clothing is saturated, shall we be able to reach camp without freezing, even after the storm is over?  We shall have to wait for sunshine, and when will it come?”

The tempered area to which we had committed ourselves extended over about one fourth of an acre; but it was only about an eighth of an inch in thickness, for the scalding gas jets were shorn off close to the ground by the oversweeping flood of frosty wind.  And how lavishly the snow fell only mountaineers may know.  The crisp crystal flowers seemed to touch one another and fairly to thicken the tremendous blast that carried them.  This was the bloom-time, the summer of the cloud, and never before have I seen even a mountain cloud flowering so profusely.