The Mountains Are Fountains Not Only Of Rivers And Fertile Soil, But
Of Men.
Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going
to the mountains is going home.
Yet how many are doomed to toil in
town shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon!
Up the canyon to Shasta would be a cure for all care. But many on
arrival seem at a loss to know what to do with themselves, and seek
shelter in the hotel, as if that were the Shasta they had come for.
Others never leave the rail, content with the window views, and cling
to the comforts of the sleeping car like blind mice to their mothers.
Many are sick and have been dragged to the healing wilderness
unwillingly for body-good alone. Were the parts of the human machine
detachable like Yankee inventions, how strange would be the gatherings
on the mountains of pieces of people out of repair!
How sadly unlike the whole-hearted ongoing of the seeker after gold is
this partial, compulsory mountaineering! - as if the mountain
treasuries contained nothing better than gold! Up the mountains they
go, high-heeled and high-hatted, laden like Christian with
mortifications and mortgages of divers sorts and degrees, some
suffering from the sting of bad bargains, others exulting in good
ones; hunters and fishermen with gun and rod and leggins; blythe and
jolly troubadours to whom all Shasta is romance; poets singing their
prayers; the weak and the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental
taxation.
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