SUMMER DAYS AT MOUNT SHASTA 



of the cliffs with their bright colors, and in 

 some of the warmer nooks of the rocks, up to 

 a height of eleven thousand feet, there are a 

 few tufts of dwarf daisies, wall-flowers, and 

 penstemons; but, notwithstanding these bloom 

 freely, they make no appreciable show at a dis- 

 tance, and the stretches of rough brown lava 

 beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as bare of 

 vegetation as the great snow-fields and glaciers 

 of the summit. 



Shasta is a fire-mountain, an old volcano 

 gradually accumulated and built up into the 

 blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of 

 ashes and molten lava which, shot high in the 

 air and falling in darkening showers, and flow- 

 ing from chasms and craters, grew outward and 

 upward like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. 

 Not in one grand convulsion was Shasta given 

 birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic 

 storm and stress, though mountains more than 

 a thousand feet in height have been cast up like 

 mole-hills in a night — quick contributions to 

 the wealth of the landscapes, and most em- 

 phatic statements, on the part of Nature, of 

 the gigantic character of the power that dwells 

 beneath the dull, dead-looking surface of the 

 earth. But sections cut by the glaciers, dis- 

 playing some of the internal framework of 

 Shasta, show that comparatively long periods 



33 



