k doors at water's edge. Towered rocks emerge from submerged reefs. A
mimic volcano rises from the water near one side. Perpetual snow fills
sheltered crevices in the southern rim.

And all this wonder is reflected, upside down, in the still mirror
through which the launch ploughs its rapid way. But looking backward
where the inverted picture is broken and tossed by the waves from the
launch's prow, he looks upon a kaleidoscope of color which he will
remember all his life; for, to the gorgeous disarray of the broken image
of the cliffs is added the magic tint of this deep-dyed water, every
wavelet of which, at its crest, seems touched for the fraction of a
second with a flash of indigo; the whole dancing, sparkling, shimmering
in a glory which words cannot convey; and on the other side, and far
astern, the subsiding waves calming back to normal in a flare of
robin's-egg blue.

Our tourist returns to the rim-side hotel to the ceremony of sunset on
Crater Lake, for which the lake abandons all traditions and clothes
itself in gold and crimson. And in the morning after looking, before
sunrise, upon a Crater Lake of hard-polished steel from which a falling
rock would surely bounce and bound away as if on ice, he breakfasts and
leaves without another look lest repetition dull his priceless memory of
an emotional experience which, all in all, can never come again the
same.

It is as impossible to describe Crater Lake as it is to paint it. Its
outlines may be photographed, but the photograph does not tell the
story. Its colors may be reproduced, but the reproduction is not Crater
Lake. More than any other spot I know, except the Grand Canyon from its
rim, Crater Lake seems to convey a glory which is not of line or mass or
color or composition, but which seems to be of the spirit. No doubt this
vivid impression which the stilled observer seems to acquire with his
mortal eye, is born somehow of his own emotion. Somehow he finds himself
in communion with the Infinite. Perhaps it is this quality which seems
so mysterious that made the Klamath Indians fear and shun Crater Lake,
just as the Indians of the great plateau feared and shunned the Grand
Canyon. It is this intangible, seemingly spiritual quality which makes
the lake impossible either to paint or to describe.

So different is this spectacle from anything else upon the continent
that the first question asked usually is how it came to be. The answer
discloses one of the mo