as purely
disinterested, if about middle age they should announce that their Point
and their Port were going to Mount Auburn with them.

The river grew narrower, its banks becoming low, perpendicular walls of
basalt, water-worn at the base, squarely cut and castellated at the top,
and bare everywhere as any pile of masonry. The hills beyond became
naked, or covered only with short grass of the _grama_ kind and
dusty-gray sage-brush. Simultaneously they lost some of their previous
basaltic characteristics, running into more convex outlines, which
receded from the river. We could not fail to recognize the fact that we
had crossed one of the great thresholds of the continent,--were once
more east of the Sierra-Nevada axis, and in the great central plateau
which a few months previous, and several hundred miles farther south, we
had crossed amid so many pains and perils by the Desert route to Washoe.
From the grizzly mountains before us to the sources of the Snake Fork
stretched an almost uninterrupted wilderness of sage. The change in
passing to this region from the fertile and timbered tracts of the
Cascades and the coast is more abrupt than can be imagined by one
familiar with our delicately modulated Eastern scenery. This sharpness
of definition seems to characterize the entire border of the plateau.
Five hours of travel between Washoe and Sacramento carry one out of the
nakedest stone heap into the grandest forest of the continent.

As we emerged from the confinement of the nearer ranges, Mount Hood,
hitherto visible only through occasional rifts, loomed broadly into
sight almost from base to peak, covered with a mantle of perennial snow
scarcely less complete to our near inspection than it had seemed from
our observatory south of Salem. Only here and there toward its lower rim
a tatter in it revealed the giant's rugged brown muscle of volcanic
rock. The top of the mountain, like that of Shasta, in direct sunlight
is an opal. So far above the line of thaw, the snow seems to have
accumulated until by its own weight it has condensed into a more
compactly crystalline structure than ice itself, and the reflections
from it, as I stated of Shasta, seem rather emanations from some
interior source of light. The look is distinctly opaline, or, as a poet
has called the opal, like "a pearl with a soul in it."

About five o'clock in the afternoon we reached the Oregon town and
mining-depot of Dalles City. A glance at any good War