safely venture to the
bottom and then, selecting some feasible portion of the opposite wall,
reascend with the same slow caution. Massive, flat-topped spurs
alternate with the gorges, plunging abruptly from the shoulders of the
snowy peaks, and planting their feet in the warm desert. These were
everywhere marked and adorned with characteristic sculptures of the
ancient glaciers that swept over this entire region like one vast
ice-wind, and the polished surfaces produced by the ponderous flood are
still so perfectly preserved that in many places the sunlight reflected
from them is about as trying to the eyes as sheets of snow.

God's glacial-mills grind slowly, but they have been kept in motion long
enough in California to grind sufficient soil for a glorious abundance
of life, though most of the grist has been carried to the lowlands,
leaving these high regions comparatively lean and bare; while the
post-glacial agents of erosion have not yet furnished sufficient
available food over the general surface for more than a few tufts of the
hardiest plants, chiefly carices and eriogonae. And it is interesting to
learn in this connection that the sparseness and repressed character of
the vegetation at this height is caused more by want of soil than by
harshness of climate; for, here and there, in sheltered hollows
(countersunk beneath the general surface) into which a few rods of
well-ground moraine chips have been dumped, we find groves of spruce and
pine thirty to forty feet high, trimmed around the edges with willow and
huckleberry bushes, and oftentimes still further by an outer ring of
tall grasses, bright with lupines, larkspurs, and showy columbines,
suggesting a climate by no means repressingly severe. All the streams,
too, and the pools at this elevation are furnished with little gardens
wherever soil can be made to lie, which, though making scarce any show
at a distance, constitute charming surprises to the appreciative
observer. In these bits of leanness a few birds find grateful homes.
Having no acquaintance with man, they fear no ill, and flock curiously
about the stranger, almost allowing themselves to be taken in the hand.
In so wild and so beautiful a region was spent my first day, every sight
and sound inspiring, leading one far out of himself, yet feeding and
building up his individuality.

Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky shadows crept out
across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at