ful
enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
mountain-ranges,--into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
excess,--into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
cycle,--spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.

To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from
possessing it. Only the _silleros_ of the Andes, our mules, horses, and
selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking
was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most
circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their
impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the
mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a
green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.

Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,--calling it "Camp Rosalie,"
after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs
and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow,
with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in
ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got
together dead wood and pitchy bou