barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc Lava Beds have for me an
uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened over all the landscape.

Then fell the gloaming, making everything still more forbidding and
mysterious. Then, darkness like death.

Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape
less hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava

Beds. Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a
stone wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers,

most of whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the
boards marking the graves--a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking

even without Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve
far more pity than they have ever received. Picking our way over the

strange ridges and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular
flat about twenty yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where

the comparative smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have
caused the grass tufts to grow taller. This is where General Canby

was slain while seeking to make peace with the treacherous Modocs.
Two or three miles farther on is the main stronghold of the Modocs,

held by them so long and defiantly against all the soldiers that could
be brought to the attack. Indians usually choose to hide in tall

grass and bush and behind trees, where they can crouch and glide like
panthers, without casting up defenses that would betray their

positions; but the Modoc castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite
Indians made raids on the settlers of the lower Merced, they withdrew

with their spoils into Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted that in
case of war they had a stone house into which no white man could come

as long as they cared to defend it. Yosemite was not held for a
single day against the pursuing troops; but the Modocs held their fort

for months, until, weary of being hemmed in, they chose to withdraw.
It consists of numerous redoubts formed by the unequal subsidence of

portions of the lava flow, and a complicatednetwork of redans
abundantly supplied with salient and re-entering angles, being united

each to the other and to the redoubts by a labyrinth of open and
covered corridors, some of which expand at intervals into spacious

caverns, forming as a whole the most complete natural Gibraltar I ever
saw. Other castles scarcely less strong are connected with this by

subterranean passages known only to the Indians, while the unnatural
blackness of the rock out of which Nature has constructed these

defenses, and the weird, inhuman physiognomy of the whole region are
well calculated to inspire terror.

Deadly was the task of storming such a place. The breech-loading
rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were

ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while
the Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways

both over and under ground, and could at any time sink suddenly out of
sight like squirrels among the loose boulders. Our bewildered

soldiers heard them shooting, now before, now behind them, as they
glided from place to place through fissures and subterranean passes,

all the while as invisible as Gyges wearing his magic ring. To judge
from the few I have seen, Modocs are not very amiable-looking people

at best. When, therefore, they were crawling stealthily in the gloomy
caverns, unkempt and begrimed and with the glare of war in their eyes,

they must have seemed very demons of the volcanic pit.
Captain Jack's cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It

measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is

littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and

startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The
sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and

eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.

Where the lava meets the lake there are some fine curving bays,
beautifully embroidered with rushes and polygonums, a favorite resort

of waterfowl. On our return, keeping close along shore, we caused a
noisy plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The

ducks, less wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out
through openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising

spangles in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less
and less forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet

rocks, looked like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald
mosses appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft

of small ferns. From year to year in the kindly weather the beds are
thus gathering beauty--beauty for ashes.

Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is
soon back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash

Creek and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the
mountain. They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of

down-grinding ice, pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of the
work they are doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very unlike

the long, majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding down
the valleys through the forests to the sea. These, with a few others

as yet nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers that
occupied the canyons now taken by the rivers, and in a few centuries

will, under present conditions, vanish altogether.
The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on

the peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again
and again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their

sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in

the season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue
again. But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small

tributary streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath
the sky of rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous

volume from seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if
their bondage in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather

in their youth, were only a blessing.
Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice

and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away

beneath the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered
and pure, in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that

they give birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun,
full-grown and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River

issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two
thirds of the volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on

the east side of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate
base.

To find the big spring of the McCloud, or "Mud Glacier," which you
will know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you

make your way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a
shaggy growth of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river

flowing in a gorge of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava
plain. Should the volume of the stream where you strike it seem

small, then you will know that you are above the spring; if large,
nearly equal to its volume at its confluence with the Pitt River, then

you are below it; and in either case have only to follow the river up
or down until you come to it.

Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may

not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in

the form of a partially interrupted sheet nearly seventy-five yards in
width, and at a height above the riverbed of about forty feet, as

nearly as I could make out without the means of exact measurement.
For about fifty yards this flat current is in one unbroken sheet, and

flows in a lacework of plashing, upleaping spray over boulders that
are clad in green silky algae and water mosses to meet the smaller

part of the river, which takes its rise farther up. Joining the river
at right angles to its course, it at once swells its volume to three

times its size above the spring.
The vivid green of the boulders beneath the water is very striking,

and colors the entire stream with the exception of the portions broken
into foam. The color is chiefly due to a species of algae which seems