Looking Ahead
From The Middle Of The Glacier, You See The Broad White Flood,
Though Apparently Rigid As Iron, Sweeping
In graceful curves between
its high mountain-like walls, small glaciers hanging in the hollows
on either side, and snow
In every form above them, and the great
down-plunging granite buttresses and headlands of the walls marvelous
in bold massive sculpture; forests in side canyons to within fifty
feet of the glacier; avalanche pathways overgrown with alder and
willow; innumerable cascades keeping up a solemn harmony of water
sounds blending with those of the glacier moulins and rills; and as
far as the eye can reach, tributary glaciers at short intervals
silently descending from their high, white fountains to swell the
grand central ice-river.
In the angle formed by the main glacier and the lake that gives
rise to the river floods, there is a massive granite dome sparsely
feathered with trees, and just beyond this yosemitic rock is a
mountain, perhaps ten thousand feet high, laden with ice and snow
which seemed pure pearly white in the morning light. Last evening as
seen from camp it was adorned with a cloud streamer, and both the
streamer and the peak were flushed in the alpenglow. A mile or two
above this mountain, on the opposite side of the glacier, there is a
rock like the Yosemite Sentinel; and in general all the wall rocks as
far as I saw them are more or less yosemitic in form and color and
streaked with cascades.
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