WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 71 



across the track, was gently hissing, with that peculiar 

 noise a powerful stream makes when it is flowing 

 very rapidly but not quite over rapids. In front of us 

 the rocky cliff, with no verdure upon it except the in- 

 evitable sage brush, rose almost precipitous; but we 

 could see the scar of a road, unf enced, which descended 

 from the top in a series of switchbacks, dug out of the 

 wall. Down the road a motor was coming, closely fol- 

 lowed by a cloud of dust. A few moments later it 

 pulled up at the platform, dust and all. There was a 

 woman at the wheel, a woman who should have been the 

 heroine of some western romance, her hands tanned, her 

 shoulders square, her eyes alert, her face extraordinarily 

 good to look upon. But, alas, her grammar was im- 

 peccable, she was mistress of the graces of sophisticated 

 society no less than of the clutches of her car! With 

 her brown hands on the wheel, we crawled up the cliff 

 side to a comparatively level plain covered with gray 

 dust and sage brush, and stretching a few miles west- 

 ward to rolling hills. Over this plain we sped, and came 

 to a little town on the shore of a lake, a town rawly new 

 and busy, like all the others in this forward-looking land. 

 Neither was the lake remarkable, save for its exquisite 

 green colour. It stretched away between hilly shores, 

 and appeared to vanish around a headland. The 

 bounding hills, the height, perhaps, of those around Lake 

 George, but much less precipitous, were partially tim- 

 bered, partially cleared to young orchards which came 



