ripe and wildly acid; a few handsome grasses belonging to two distinct
species, and one goldenrod; a few hairy lupines and radiant spragueas,
whose blue and rose-colored flowers were set off to fine advantage amid
green carices; and along a narrow seam in the very warmest angle of the
wall a perfectly gorgeous fringe of _Epilobium obcordatum_ with
flowers an inch wide, crowded together in lavish profusion, and colored
as royal a purple as ever was worn by any high-bred plant of the
tropics; and best of all, and greatest of all, a noble thistle in full
bloom, standing erect, head and shoulders above his companions, and
thrusting out his lances in sturdy vigor as if growing on a Scottish
brae. All this brave warm bloom among the raw stones, right in the face
of the onlooking glaciers.

As far as I have been able to find out, these upper lakes are
snow-buried in winter to a depth of about thirty-five or forty feet, and
those most exposed to avalanches, to a depth of even a hundred feet or
more. These last are, of course, nearly lost to the landscape. Some
remain buried for years, when the snowfall is exceptionally great, and
many open only on one side late in the season. The snow of the closed
side is composed of coarse granules compacted and frozen into a firm,
faintly stratified mass, like the _neve_ of a glacier. The lapping
waves of the open portion gradually undermine and cause it to break off
in large masses like icebergs, which gives rise to a precipitous front
like the discharging wall of a glacier entering the sea. The play of the
lights among the crystal angles of these snow-cliffs, the pearly white
of the outswelling bosses, the bergs drifting in front, aglow in the sun
and edged with green water, and the deep blue disk of the lake itself
extending to your feet,--this forms a picture that enriches all your
afterlife, and is never forgotten. But however perfect the season and
the day, the cold incompleteness of these young lakes is always keenly
felt. We approach them with a kind of mean caution, and steal
unconfidingly around their crystal shores, dashed and ill at ease, as if
expecting to hear some forbidding voice. But the love-songs of the
ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and
manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most
solitary of them all.

CHAPTER VII

THE GLACIER MEADOWS

After the lakes on the High Sierra come the glacier meadows. The