edge and eight thousand on its upper, and is the most regular and best
defined of the three.

The Alpine Zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf
pines (Pinus albicaulis), which forms the upper edge of the timberline.
This species reaches an elevation of about nine thousand feet, but at
this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet into the thin
frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind and snow; yet they
hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of beautiful purple flowers
and produce cones and seeds. Down towards the edge of the fir belt they
stand erect, forming small, well-formed trunks, and are associated with
the taller two-leafed and mountain pines and the beautiful Williamson
spruce. Bryanthus, a beautiful flowering heathwort, flourishes a few
hundred feet above the timberline, accompanied with kalmia and spiraea.
Lichens enliven the faces of the cliffs with their bright colors, and in
some of the warmer nooks of the rocks, up to a height of eleven
thousand feet, there are a few tufts of dwarf daisies, wallflowers,
and penstemons; but, notwithstanding these bloom freely, they make no
appreciable show at a distance, and the stretches of rough brown lava
beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as bare of vegetation as the great
snow fields and glaciers of the summit.

Shasta is a fire-mountain, an old volcano gradually accumulated and
built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of ashes
and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in darkening
showers, and flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward and upward
like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand convulsion
was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic storm
and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet in height have
been cast up like molehills in a night--quick contributions to the
wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic statements, on the part of
Nature, of the gigantic character of the power that dwells beneath
the dull, dead-looking surface of the earth. But sections cut by the
glaciers, displaying some of the internal framework of Shasta, show
that comparatively long periods of quiescence intervened between many
distinct eruptions, during which the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and
took their places as permanent additions to the bulk of the growing
mountain. Thus with alternate haste and deliberation eruption succeeded
eruption, until