chance to find Pluto's Cave, already mentioned; but
it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on a level with
the general surface of the ground, and have been made simply by the
falling-in of portions of the roof. Far the most beautiful and richly
furnished of the mountain caves of California occur in a thick belt
of metamorphic limestone that is pretty generally developed along the
western flank of the Sierra from the McCloud River to the Kaweah, a
distance of nearly four hundred miles. These volcanic caves are not
wanting in interest, and it is well to light a pitch pine torch and take
a walk in these dark ways of the underworld whenever opportunity offers,
if for no other reason to see with new appreciation on returning to the
sunshine the beauties that lie so thick about us.

Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson's, and is one of the
principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it takes
its name. It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage plain of
Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high. Its summit
lies at an elevation of five thousand five hundred feet above the sea,
and has several square miles of comparatively level surface, where
bunchgrass grows and the snow does not lie deep, thus allowing the hardy
sheep to pick up a living through the winter months when deep snows have
driven them down from the lofty ridges of Shasta.

From here it might be well to leave the immediate base of the mountain
for a few days and visit the Lava Beds made famous by the Modoc War.
They lie about forty miles to the northeastward, on the south shore
of Rhett or Tule [7] Lake, at an elevation above sea level of about
forty-five hundred feet. They are a portion of a flow of dense black
vesicular lava, dipping northeastward at a low angle, but little changed
as yet by the weather, and about as destitute of soil as a glacial
pavement. The surface, though smooth in a general way as seen from
a distance, is dotted with hillocks and rough crater-like pits, and
traversed by a network of yawning fissures, forming a combination of
topographical conditions of very striking character. The way lies by
Mount Bremer, over stretches of gray sage plains, interrupted by rough
lava slopes timbered with juniper and yellow pine, and with here and
there a green meadow and a stream.

This is a famous game region, and you will be likely to meet small bands
of antelope, mule deer, and wild sheep. Mo