the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."

That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
translation of any Scripture of Nature.

We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
height,--a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
_spiculae_--they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.

There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.

I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,--broadly burning, rather
than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
that sun, clear back to the first _avant-courier_ trace of purple
twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim--yes, as if it were the very
butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven--ran that wall, always
sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
might climb or sparrow fly,--so broad that it was just faint-lined like
the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,--so
lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
examination, we discovered how greatly som