Then you are free to make wide waverings and zigzags away from the
roads to visit the great fountain
Streams of the rivers, the glaciers
also, and the wildest retreats in the primeval forests, where the best
plants and animals dwell, and where many a flower-bell will ring
against your knees, and friendly trees will reach out their fronded
branches and touch you as you pass. One blanket will be enough to
carry, or you may forego the pleasure and burden altogether, as wood
for fires is everywhere abundant. Only a little food will be
required. Berries and plums abound in season, and quail and grouse
and deer - the magnificent shaggy mule deer as well as the common
species.
As you sweep around so grand a center, the mountain itself seems to
turn, displaying its riches like the revolving pyramids in jewelers'
windows. One glacier after another comes into view, and the outlines
of the mountain are ever changing, though all the way around, from
whatever point of view, the form is maintained of a grand, simple cone
with a gently sloping base and rugged, crumbling ridges separating the
glaciers and the snowfields more or less completely. The play of
colors, from the first touches of the morning sun on the summit, down
the snowfields and the ice and lava until the forests are aglow, is a
never-ending delight, the rosy lava and the fine flushings of the snow
being ineffably lovely.
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