there was evidently plenty more below that.

To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house. You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope up from your roof-peak. Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end, our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still living, and all have the bark upon them still, while the tree is to some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter, over one hundred and twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque, the rest of us izing away at something scientific,-Botany, Entomology, or Statistics. In Geol

VOL. XIII.

48

ogy and Mineralogy there is nothing to do here or in the Valley,―the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's, your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an average timber-tree as a large man against Sequoia gigantea. What our artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees' color, a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.

Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped down intensely cold through the granite chasms, - all of them fed from the snow-peaks,. and charmingly picturesque, most of them good trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving Clark's, we crossed the largest of these,. a fork of the Merced which flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us quite apropos at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily furnished us with frogs enough for an entrée. Between two and three in the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall the Yo

Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy, save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.

Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign' intersected our trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless; but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy daylily with an odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail turned at a sharp angle and we stood on tion Point."

Inspira

a man fair and square, it splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.

I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly, for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spellbound to the tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh, broadly burning, rather than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From that sun, clear back to the first avant-courier trace of purple twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim—yes, as if it were the very butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven-ran that wall, always sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel might climb or sparrow fly,-so broad that it was just faint-lined like the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,-so lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice surpassed our immediate vis-à-vis in height.

First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway and

bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built on its grand flat top.

t

And, oh the gorgeous masses of light and shadow which the falling sun cast on it, the shadows like great waves, the lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,

thrown up from the heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish alias, Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "El Capitan" the idea of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.

some

Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the skyline, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous To-coy-æ, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.

We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories, and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an angle of forty-five degrees or

more from the spot where we were standing, and make a succession of oblique prism - sections whose upper edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered glacis of detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life save the paleozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a Yo-Semite crag inorganic, as I used to speak of everything not strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the débris at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuviæ of a stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads at a time, if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of some one small being in the fenceless vivarium of the Universe? Let not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.

I have spoken of the Great South

Dome in the masculine gender, but the native tradition makes it feminine. No where is there a more beautiful Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave. Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was its fostering god, — the former a radiant maiden, the latter an ever-young immortal, —

66 amorous as the month of May." Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer, kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley - tribes began to starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened, and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty cone split from heaven to earth, its frontal half falling down to dam the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches, its other segment remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the inmemoriam title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan, where a lively faith and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.

Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,-in the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact, and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and passing it around with the sense of

a liberty to present it next in his own way; but a fact with its facets cut — otherwise a poem-is unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal translation; poems circulate virgin and verbatim. In some future article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River, and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by the lantern of Indian legend.

excess,

into

Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun, - chrysoprase beautiful enough to have been the tenth foundation - stone of John's apocalyptic heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great mountain-ranges, a field of perfect light, misty by its own -into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new cycle, spout up remorseful lavas from her longhardened conscience, and hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above,

save for the shining serpent of the Merced, which silently.to our ears threaded the middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset wherever for a space he glided out of the shadow of woods.

To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from possessing it. Only the silleros of the Andes, our mules, horses, and selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.

Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp, — calling it "Camp Rosalie," after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow, with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring fire,―made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a threeforked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks, -selected a cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant baldacchini for the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep on evergreen - strewings.

During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the game- department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought

our horses up from picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and colorboxes, the sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of injunction about the dumpling in the grouse - fricassee.

Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a living landscape, color-studies on the spot; and though I am not here to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks' camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting specimens of all kinds, — Agassizing, so to speak.

I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish, to that select minority of illuminati who go trouting for intellectual culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a Sonata of Beethoven's,-who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola in the cast of a fly,- who call three little troutlings "a splendid day's sport, me boy!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon, and those the dull, black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots, -I gave over bothering the unambi