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 attractivehighway. 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. "There," said I, addressing my feet,
to whose separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any

mountain, "that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town
stairs, and dead pavements." I felt degraded and worthless. I had

not yet reached the most difficult portion of the canyon, but I
determined to guide my humbled body over the most nerve-trying places

I could find; for I was now awake, and felt confident that the last of
the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet.

I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom
of the main canyon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No

plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my
bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I

slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling
was gone.

The gorged portion of the canyon, in which I spent all the next day,
is about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing

the action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge,
which is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated canyon, formed in

the bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main canyon. I
will not stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a

shadowy line, from Cloud's Rest. In high water, the stream occupies
all the bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power

from wall to wall. But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered
the gorge, scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire

length. By cool efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the
upper end in a little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second

night in the gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short
pencil-letter in my notebook:--

The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the
great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and

swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with
snow. I am now only a mile from last night's camp; and have been

climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive
gorge. It is formed in the bottom of the main canyon, among the

roots of Cloud's Rest. It begins at the filled-up lake basin where
I camped last night, and ends a few hundred yards above, in another

basin of the same kind. The walls everywhere are craggy and
vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is only from twenty

to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken enough, the
thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded,

for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.
I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and

goes brawling by in rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white
in the light, half in shadow. As I look from the opening jaws of

this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front--high in the
stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body

gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left,
sculptured from the main Cloud's Rest ridge, are three magnificent

rocks, sisters of the great South Dome. On the right is the
massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down in

the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with
forest. In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is singing against

boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams. Now look back
twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the

moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark
background of shadow. A little to the left, and a dozen steps this

side of the fall, a flickering light marks my camp--and a precious
camp it is. A huge, glacier-polished slab, falling from the

smooth, glossy flank of Cloud's Rest, happened to settle on edge
against the wall of the gorge. I did not know that this slab was

glacier-polished until I lighted my fire. Judge of my delight. I
think it was sent here by an earthquake. It is about twelve feet

square. I wish I could take it home[4] for a hearthstone.
Beneath this slab is the only place in this torrent-swept gorge

where I could find sand sufficient for a bed.
I expected to sleep on the boulders, for I spent most of the

afternoon on the slippery wall of the canyon, endeavoring to get
around this difficult part of the gorge, and was compelled to

hasten down here for water before dark. I shall sleep soundly on
this sand; half of it is mica. Here, wonderful to behold, are a

few green stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass. They are here
to meet us. Ay, even here in this darksome gorge, "frightened and

tormented" with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow.
Can it be? As if rubus and the grass leaf were not enough of God's

tender prattle words of love, which we so much need in these mighty
temples of power, yonder in the "benmost bore" are two blessed

adiantums. Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this
one big word of love that we call the world! Good-night. Do you

see the fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and
the rubus and grass panicles? And do you hear how sweet a sleep-

song the fall and cascades are singing?
The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the

rocks kept my fire alive all through the night. Next morning I rose
nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form

of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing
some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted;

and here the canyon is all broadly open again--the floor luxuriantly
forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked

libocedrus. The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes
down seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little

Yosemite valley. It is about two thousand feet above the level of the
main Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.

I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that
the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were

reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm
evening mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to

believe the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it,
cautiously stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the

ice, I seemed to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the
surface of the water. The ice was so transparent that I could see

through it the beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales
of mica glinting back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with

my face close to the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I
was delighted to discover myriads of Tyndall's six-rayed water

flowers, magnificently colored.
A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier

period it was a mer de glace, far grander than the mer de glace of
Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya mer de

glace was not less than two miles broad, late in the glacier epoch,
when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and its depth was

not less than fifteen hundred feet. Ice streams from Mounts Lyell and
Dana, and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral

Peak, flowed hither, welded into one, and worked together. After
eroding this Tanaya Lake basin, and all the splendidly sculptured