diate margin,--getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,--we came at
last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.

This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.

At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a _cul-de-sac_ of Nature's
grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us
in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite _barathrum_,
whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the
crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous
series of Yo-Semite _effects_; eight hundred feet above us, could we
climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the
broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks;
thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the
eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us
as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came.
Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the
battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun,
towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting
snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky
at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,--of
holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way
have we toiled since then,--and we know better now. Have we endured all
these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,--"Climb
forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?

Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost
treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye an