212 



Motoring in the High Sierras 



storm-tinted at summit, and dark where, mate forms out of which something living 

 swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks has gone forever. From the desert have 



been dried up and blown away its seas. 



Their shores and white, salt-strewn bot- 



plunge over canyon walls into blue, silent 

 gulfs." 



Behind stood "the West chain, a great 



toms lie there in the eloquence of death. 



A crude mountain bridge spanning the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus. 



mural ridge watched over by heights . . . 

 denning against the western sky a multi- 

 tude of peaks and spires. Bold buttresses 

 jut out through fields of ice and reach 

 down stone arms among snow and debris. 

 North and south of us the higher, or east- 

 ern, summit stretched on in miles and miles 

 of snow-peaks, the farthest horizon still 

 crowded with their white points. 



"The two halves of this view, both in 

 sight at once, express the highest, the 

 most acute, aspects of desolation inani- 



Sharp, white light glances from all the 

 mountain walls, where in marks and pol- 

 ishings has been written the epitaph of 

 glaciers now melted and vanished into air. 

 Vacant canyons lie open to the sun, bare, 

 treeless, half-shrouded with snow, cum- 

 bered with loads of broken debris, still as 

 graves, except when flights of rocks rush 

 down some chasm's throat, startling the 

 mountains with harsh, dry rattle, their 

 fainter echoes from below followed too 

 quickly by dense silence." 



