erson entering
one's bedroom. It was hard to realize that she was in her place in the
sky, and was looking abroad on half the globe, land and sea, mountains,
plains, lakes, rivers, oceans, ships, cities with their myriads of
inhabitants sleeping and waking, sick and well. No, she seemed to be
just on the rim of Bloody Canon and looking only at me. This was indeed
getting near to Nature. I remember watching the harvest moon rising
above the oak trees in Wisconsin apparently as big as a cart-wheel and
not farther than half a mile distant. With these exceptions I might say
I never before had seen the moon, and this night she seemed so full of
life and so near, the effect was marvelously impressive and made me
forget the Indians, the great black rocks above me, and the wild uproar
of the winds and waters making their way down the huge jagged gorge. Of
course I slept but little and gladly welcomed the dawn over the Mono
Desert. By the time I had made a cupful of tea the sunbeams were pouring
through the canyon, and I set forth, gazing eagerly at the tremendous
walls of red slates savagely hacked and scarred and apparently ready to
fall in avalanches great enough to choke the pass and fill up the chain
of lakelets. But soon its beauties came to view, and I bounded lightly
from rock to rock, admiring the polished bosses shining in the slant
sunshine with glorious effect in the general roughness of moraines and
avalanche taluses, even toward the head of the canyon near the highest
fountains of the ice. Here, too, are most of the lowly plant people seen
yesterday on the other side of the divide now opening their beautiful
eyes. None could fail to glory in Nature's tender care for them in so
wild a place. The little ouzel is flitting from rock to rock along the
rapid swirling Canon Creek, diving for breakfast in icy pools, and
merrily singing as if the huge rugged avalanche-swept gorge was the most
delightful of all its mountain homes. Besides a high fall on the north
wall of the canyon, apparently coming direct from the sky, there are many
narrow cascades, bright silvery ribbons zigzagging down the red cliffs,
tracing the diagonal cleavage joints of the metamorphic slates, now
contracted and out of sight, now leaping from ledge to ledge in filmy
sheets through which the sunbeams sift. And on the main Canon Creek, to
which all these are tributary, is a series of small falls, cascades, and
rapids extending all the way down to the fo