MORMON LILIES 



forth from innumerable rifts and craters; when 

 the ice of the Glacial Period was laid like a 

 mantle over every mountain and valley — 

 throughout all these immensely protracted 

 periods, in the throng of these majestic opera- 

 tions, Nature kept her flower children in mind. 

 She considered the liUes, and, while planting 

 the plains with sage and the hills with cedar, 

 she has covered at least one mountain with 

 golden erythroniums and fritUlarias as its 

 crowning glory, as if willing to show what she 

 could do in the Uly Une even here. 



Looking southward from the south end of 

 Salt Lake, the two northmost peaks of the 

 Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into 

 the cool sky without any marked character, 

 excepting only their snow crowns, and a few 

 small weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, 

 the simpUcity of their slopes preventing their 

 real loftiness from bemg appreciated. Gray, 

 sagey plains circle around their bases, and up 

 to a height of a thousand feet or more their 

 sides are tinged with purple, which I after- 

 wards foimd is produced by a close growth of 

 dwarf oak just coming into leaf. Higher you 

 may detect faint tintings of green on a gray 

 ground, from young grasses and sedges; then 

 come the dark pine woods filling glacial hol- 

 lows, and over all the smooth crown of snow. 



127 



