y
barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their
distinction is that they never get anywhere.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where
a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by
singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and
madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the
mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not
revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an
intolerable thirst.

The river canons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth while than
most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the choice of streets,
not very well determined by their names. There is always an amount of
local history to be read in the names of mountain highways where one
touches the successive waves of occupation or discovery, as in the old
villages where the neighborhoods are not built but grow. Here you have
the Spanish Californian in _Cero Gordo_ and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,--easy
to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that; Mist Canon
and Paddy Jack's. The streets of the west Sierras sloping toward the San
Joaquin are long and winding, but from the east, my country, a day's
ride carries one to the lake regions. The next day reaches the passes of
the high divide, but whether one gets passage depends a little on how
many have gone that road before, and much on one's own powers. The
passes are steep and windy ridges, though not the highest. By two and
three thousand feet the snow-caps overtop them. It is even possible to
win through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line, but one
misses a great exhilaration.

The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out into long
shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a
distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible keen
polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems. When those
glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how
long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.

Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best time to go
up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the merely idle or
sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and understanding, the be