man eye has looked upon, beyond were other bluffs and
precipices, pearly gray and purplish-white, with green fringes below,
and dark archways or fantastic figures traced by shadows on their
surface. There were buttresses, as of gigantic cathedrals, and archways
such as might support hills of granite, and domes where a mountain was
the substructure, and half domes, and peaks whose regular succession has
given them the name of "Brothers,"--all varying in color and shadow,
incessantly, with the receding light; some with the delicious cool gray
of the rock color, some white, with a reddish shade; others faint
purple; others resplendent in pink and brilliant purple; while over
their edges, giving a joyous life to the scene, rushed sparkling silver
streams, in innumerable waterfalls, dashing into the green valley
below.... But the scene was changing. Over the valley, the heavy shadow
of El Capitan continually increased its gigantic breadth of shade;
beyond him the "Arches," which, to be seen at that distance, must be a
thousand feet in height, grew each instant more strongly marked, but
still farther beyond to the east the North Dome and the Half Dome were
golden and purple in the evening light, and yet beyond the still white
peaks of the Sierras towered above in the pale blue.

On our side of the vast gorge the foot of the various precipices and
cliffs was covered with detritus, making, near the bottom, a
considerable slope, on which grew many evergreen trees.

On the other side there was one line of massive rock, which fell
apparently plumb, without a break or curve, for nearly four thousand
feet, and at its base, so hard was the material, there seemed no recent
detritus at all. One could evidently touch the very bottom of the
immense fall of rock....

The form of the canyon is unique, nothing in Europe resembling it: the
immense vertical walls rising so abruptly from the green vale; the
peaks, too, which surround it, being original, even in the Sierras; the
immense, inaccessible, concentric masses of granite,--domes, or
half-domes, as if melted in some gigantic mould, and then, when cooled,
left standing in the air.

One of the grandest and most beautiful objects in the valley was
directly opposite our hotel, and its music never ceased, day or
night,--the Yosemite Fall. The stream which bears this name heads about
ten miles away, and then flows down, almost directly over the mighty
precipice, into the valley below,--a