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I say, appeared to be; for we stood in thick fog or in the heart of clouds which limited our dim view to a radius of twenty feet. It was a warm and cheerful fog, stirred by little wind, but moving, shifting, and boiling as by its own volatile nature, rolling up black from below and dancing in silvery splendor overhead As a fog it could not have been improved; as a medium for viewing the landscape it was a failure and we lay down upon the Sybarite couch of moss, as in a Russian bath, to await revelations.

We waited two hours without change, except an occasional hopeful lightness in the fog above, and at last the appearance for a moment of the spectral sun. Only for an instant was this luminous promise vouchsafed. But we watched in intense excitement. There it was again; and this time the fog was so thin overhead that we caught sight of a patch of blue sky a yard square, across which the curtain was instantly drawn. A little wind was stirring, and the fog boiled up from the valley caldrons thicker than ever. But the spell was broken. In a moment more Old Phelps was shouting, “The sun!” and before we could gain our feet there was a patch of sky overhead as big as a farm. “See! quick!” The old man was dancing like a lunatic. There was a rift in the vapor at our feet, down, down, three thousand feet into the forest abyss, and lo! lifting out of it yonder the tawny side of Dix,–the vision of a second, snatched away in the rolling fog. The play had just begun. Before we could turn, there was the gorge of Caribou Pass, savage and dark, visible to the bottom. The opening shut as suddenly; and then, looking over the clouds, miles away we saw the peaceful farms of the Au Sable Valley, and in a moment more the plateau of North Elba and the sentinel mountains about the grave of John Brown. These glimpses were as fleeting as thought, and instantly we were again isolated in the sea of mist. The expectation of these sudden strokes of sublimity kept us exultingly on the alert; and yet it was a blow of surprise when the curtain was swiftly withdrawn on the west, and the long ridge of Colvin, seemingly within a stone’s throw, heaved up like an island out of the ocean, and was the next moment ingulfed. We waited longer for Dix to show its shapely peak and its glistening sides of rock gashed by avalanches. The fantastic clouds, torn and streaming, hurried up from the south in haste as if to a witch’s rendezvous, hiding and disclosing the great summit in their flight. The mist boiled up from the valley, whirled over the summit where we stood, and plunged again into the depths. Objects were forming and disappearing, shifting and dancing, now in sun and now gone in fog, and in the elemental whirl we felt that we were “assisting” in an original process of creation. The sun strove, and his very striving called up new vapors; the wind rent away the clouds, and brought new masses to surge about us; and the spectacle to right and left, above and below, changed with incredible swiftness. Such glory of abyss and summit, of color and form and transformation, is seldom granted to mortal eyes. For an hour we watched it until our vast mountain was revealed in all its bulk, its long spurs, its abysses and its savagery, and the great basins of wilderness with their shining lakes, and the giant peaks of the region, were one by one disclosed, and hidden and again tranquil in the sunshine.

Where was the cave? There was ample surface in which to look for it. If we could have flitted about, like the hawks that came circling round, over the steep slopes, the long spurs, the jagged precipices, I have no doubt we should have found it. But moving about on this mountain is not a holiday pastime; and we were chiefly anxious to discover a practicable mode of descent into the great wilderness basin on the south, which we must traverse that afternoon before reaching the hospitable shanty on Mud Pond. It was enough for us to have discovered the general whereabouts of the Spanish Cave, and we left the fixing of its exact position to future explorers.