A NEAR VIEW OF THE HIGH SIERRA 65 



experiences, Instinct, or Guardian Angel, call it 

 what you will, came forward and assumed control. 

 Then my trembling muscles became firm again, 

 every rift and flaw in the rock was seen as through 

 a microscope, and my limbs moved with a posi- 

 tiveness and precision with which I seemed to have 

 nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon 

 wings, my deliverance could not have been more 

 complete. 



Above this memorable spot, the face of the 

 mountain is still more savagely hacked and torn. 

 It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in 

 the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles 

 of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten 

 ready to be launched below. But the strange in 

 flux of strength I had received seemed inexhaus 

 tible. I found a way without effort, and soon 

 stood upon the topmost crag in the blessed light. 



How truly glorious the landscape circled around 

 this noble summit ! giant mountains, valleys in 

 numerable, glaciers and meadows, rivers and lakes, 

 with the wide blue sky bent tenderly over them all. 

 But in my first hour of freedom from that terrible 

 shadow, the sunlight in which I was laving seemed 

 all in all. 



Looking southward along the axis of the range, 

 the eye is first caught by a row of exceedingly 

 sharp and slender spires, which rise openly to a 

 height of about a thousand feet, above a series of 

 short, residual glaciers that lean back against their 

 bases ; their fantastic sculpture and the unrelieved 

 sharpness with which they spring out of the ice 

 rendering them peculiarly wild and striking. These 



