THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA* 

 By Chester H. Rowell 

 ^ • 



MR. Chairman and Fellow Mountain Lovers: — Let me 

 first congratulate you on your good looks, and hope that 

 friends have recognized each other in spite of those good looks. I 

 have seen you when you looked otherwise, and I have, on those occa- 

 sions, observed some other things than looks — for instance, a new 

 aspect of femininism. Even our great-grandparents recognized that 

 women were our moral superiors. It took our generation to discover, 

 by humiliating experiences, in schools and lately in politics, that 

 women are our intellectual superiors; but it took the Sierra Club to 

 reveal that they are our physical superiors. I used to think I was a 

 pretty good mountain "hiker" myself; but no matter how long or 

 how hard a walk I took, there was always some Sierra Club girl 

 ahead who had beaten my record. 



You are to be congratulated not merely on your membership, but 

 on your mission, for you are dedicated to the doctrine that no matter 

 how thick this earth may be piled with the works of man, there shall 

 still be preserved on it some of the works of God. We may scratch 

 the earth for our crops and pile up baked earth for our dwellings 

 and factories to supply the needs of our bodies, but also we still need 

 the earthly symbols of the Infinite to minister to the infinite soul 

 within. 



The earth has two symbols of the Infinite — the great mountains 

 and the great sea. But there is one creed of the mountains and an- 

 other of the sea. The mountain is a theist ; the sea a pantheist. The 

 mountain points upward to heaven; the sea dissolves into Nirvana. 



On the mountain the finger of God has written the story of crea- 

 tion. There is beginning and middle and end, and a multitude of 

 episodes and digressions. The mountain itself is a growth, a visible 

 handiwork. Upheaved in the morning of time from the metal bow- 

 els of Earth; corroded into earthy salts by rains of boiling acid; 

 laid down in the bed of a steaming sea and upheaved again ; buried 



*Address delivered at the Annual Reunion Dinner of the Sierra Club, at the Palace 

 Hotel, San Francisco, December 9, 1921, 



