plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the
opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories,
and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an
angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were
standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper
edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory
of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the
North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer
mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as
elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked
semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller
Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing
to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered _glacis_ of
detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life
save the palaeozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus
from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a
Yo-Semite crag _inorganic_, as I used to speak of everything not
strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that
utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the
_debris_ at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and _exuviae_ of a
stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were
going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us
because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before
Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in
the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived
long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but
one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads
at a time,--if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of
some one small being in the fenceless _vivarium_ of the Universe? Let
not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly
upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we
bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.

I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the
native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful
Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few
short sentences from the long report