I Have Gazed On Tissiack A Thousand Times - In Days Of Solemn
Storms, And When Her Form Shone Divine With
The jewelry of winter, or
was veiled in living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and
snowy,
Tuneful waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul
reveal itself more impressively than now. I hung about her skirts,
lingering timidly, until the higher mountains and glaciers compelled
me to push up the canyon.
This canyon is accessible only to mountaineers, and I was anxious to
carry my barometer and clinometer through it, to obtain sections and
altitudes, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had
passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and
scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the
lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that
plushes the roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and
was ascending a precipitous rock front, smoothed by glacial action,
when I suddenly fell - for the first time since I touched foot to
Sierra rocks. After several somersaults, I became insensible from the
shock, and when consciousness returned I found myself wedged among
short, stiff bushes, trembling as if cold, not injured in the
slightest.
Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long;
probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what
made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had
rolled a little further, my mountain climbing would have been
finished, for just beyond the bushes the canyon wall steepened and I
might have fallen to the bottom.
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