The midnight hour I spent alone on the highest summit, one of the most
impressive hours of my life. The deepest silence seemed to press down
on all the vast, immeasurable, virgin landscape. The sun near the
horizon reddened the edges of belted cloud bars near the base of the
sky, and the jagged ice bowlders crowded together over the frozen
ocean stretching indefinitely northward, while more than a hundred
miles of that mysterious Wrangell Land was seen blue in the
northwest--a wavering line of hill and dale over the white and blue
ice prairie and pale gray mountains beyond, well calculated to fix the
eye of a mountaineer; but it was to the far north that I ever found
myself turning, where the ice met the sky. I would fain have watched
here all the strange night, but was compelled to remember the charge
given me by the captain, to make haste and return to the ship as soon
as I should find it possible, as there was ten miles of shifting,
drifting ice between us and the open sea.