GLACIER PARK 53 



screaming after an hour or two, in sheer weariness (all 

 but the "womanly woman," who keeps it up for a 

 day), a set expression of terrified resignation taking the 

 place of oral appeal. Always, here, as in other moun- 

 tains, the first few miles of a trail are through timber, 

 with only occasional glimpses between the tree trunks 

 of the peaks beyond, standing up now in the morning 

 light, at evening, on the return journey, taking the rose 

 of sunset on their snow caps. A mountain summit seen 

 through the columnar aisles of a forest, however, its 

 lower slopes screened out, rises with an isolated majesty 

 against the sky, ethereal and alone. Up the first few 

 miles of the trail it beckons you, down the last few it 

 bids farewell. 



But it was when we broke out of timber into a glimpse 

 of our first upland meadow that I knew I was lost, I was 

 a slave forever to the Rocky Mountains. The sirens 

 were singing beside the path, little brooks of ice water 

 tumbling down from the snowfields just above. Upon 

 a cliff sat the Lorelei, and combed her hair of spun 

 silver, which came streaming down the dripping ledge of 

 red and green and purple rock and she, too, was sing- 

 ing. At her feet grew yellow columbine, blue lark- 

 spur, lupine, and false forget-me-not. In her hand she 

 held a dark red monkey flower. Over her, dwarfed like 

 a print by Hiroshige, a twisted, limber pine flaunted its 

 pink cone buds. And she looked up to a towering cliff 

 wall three thousand feet high, and she looked down over 



