rthquake!" feeling sure I was going to learn
something. The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one
another so closely, that I had to balance myself carefully in walking as
if on the deck of a ship among waves, and it seemed impossible that the
high cliffs of the Valley could escape being shattered. In particular,
I feared that the sheer-fronted Sentinel Rock, towering above my cabin,
would be shaken down, and I took shelter back of a large yellow pine,
hoping that it might protect me from at least the smaller outbounding
boulders. For a minute or two the shocks became more and more
violent--flashing horizontal thrusts mixed with a few twists and
battering, explosive, upheaving jolts,--as if Nature were wrecking her
Yosemite temple, and getting ready to build a still better one.

I was now convinced before a single boulder had fallen that earthquakes
were the talus-makers and positive proof soon came. It was a calm
moonlight night, and no sound was heard for the first minute or so, save
low, muffled, underground, bubbling rumblings, and the whispering and
rustling of the agitated trees, as if Nature were holding her breath.
Then, suddenly, out of the strange silence and strange motion there came
a tremendous roar. The Eagle Rock on the south wall, about a half a mile
up the Valley, gave way and I saw it falling in thousands of the great
boulders I had so long been studying, pouring to the Valley floor
in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime
spectacle--an arc of glowing, passionate fire, fifteen hundred feet
span, as true in form and as serene in beauty as a rainbow in the midst
of the stupendous, roaring rock-storm. The sound was so tremendously
deep and broad and earnest, the whole earth like a living creature
seemed to have at last found a voice and to be calling to her sister
planets. In trying to tell something of the size of this awful sound it
seems to me that if all the thunder of all the storms I had ever heard
were condensed into one roar it would not equal this rock-roar at the
birth of a mountain talus. Think, then, of the roar that arose to heaven
at the simultaneous birth of all the thousands of ancient canyon-taluses
throughout the length and breadth of the Range!

The first severe shocks were soon over, and eager to examine the
new-born talus I ran up the Valley in the moonlight and climbed upon it
before the huge blocks, after their fiery flight, had come to complet