C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

180 THE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATenjoyed for the better part of a whole day was from a distance of 100 miles. Thefirst time we saw it was one evening about sunset. The clouds had lifted from thesummit of that gigantic, nugget-shaped peak, It was partly lit up to an etherealshade of pink and partly in shadow, while lower down one cloud-bar cut acrossthe mountain and below that again was a repetition of the ethereal pink colourproduced by sunlight on snow.Next morning the two breezy American girls came to our cabin at 4, with amessage from the pilot asking us to come on deck at once. There was Denali, stillvery far away, bathed in the dawn light, outlined in perfect clarity from roots tosummit, the most beautiful mountain we had ever seen. No modern floodlightingof an ancient building was ever so spectacular.Later, after steaming up the Tanana River, we left the steamer at Nenana andhad to wait there 24 hours for the train to Seward. We breakfasted, took rooms atthe hotel, bought sandwiches and hurried to a ridge overlooking the town, inorder to spend the whole day up there looking at Denali. It dominated ourthoughts just as it dominated its own semi -circular range of peaks and the wholelandscape, although it was about a hundred miles distant. The vast interveningflattish country was aflame with rosebay willow-herb, then in its seeding time,with all the purple flowers turned into red seed-pods.We remained on that ridge all day, Gwen sketching while I lay stretched outbeside some trees, gazing at the mountain.That peak was regal, dominant, or, to use the jargon of today, it was something"out of this world." Our whole day spent in its presence was a privilege that wenever could forget. As we turned away to come down the hill for supper, we mettwo men carrying the meat of a bear that they had just shot. One of them was aSwiss who had been 22 years in the country and was now living on a lake a littleway down the river. Whenever he wanted food he would go out and shoot a deer.Somehow this encounter seemed to be a fitting end to our day spent gazing atDenali, the monarch of that wild country.One more view we had of the mountain during our railway journey fromNenana to Seward. This was from Broad Pass on the height ofland. The mountainstill dominated every other object, dwarfing each peak of the range fromwhich it was reared up towards the sky.