years. They have the wit to win sustenance from the raw material

of life without intervention, but they have not the sleek look of
the women whom the social organization conspires to nourish.

Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual
ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers along after the

accustomed time, but that also failed. By all counts she would
have been about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit in the

dust on the sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength left
for anything but looking. And in time she paid the toll of the

smoky huts and became blind. This is a thing so long expected by
the Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither bitter nor

sweet, but tolerable because common. There were three other blind
women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had

memory and speech. By noon of the sun there were never any left in
the campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat

to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it were cold, they
burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed

the shadow of the wickiup around. Stir much out of their places
they hardly dared, since one might not help another; but they

called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and reminder across the
ash heaps.

Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour
to spare, there are things to be learned of life not set down in

any books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and
desire, but no whimpering. Now and then one or another of the

blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit
gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by

your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness
of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the

privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day. There
is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of

life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven
walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for

behavior. Very early the Indian learns to possess his countenance
in impassivity, to cover his head with his blanket. Something to

wrap around him is as necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet
to pray in.

So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the
unlit hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her

spirit against the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact
quite as much of these matters as you who have a larger hope,

though she has none but the certainty that having borne herself
courageously to this end she will not be reborn a coyote.

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS
All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow

they go up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes
otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of

the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide
enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this

distinction in mind,--valleys are the sunken places of the earth,
canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God. They have a

better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of
pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in the hill

country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony
barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their

distinction is that they never get anywhere.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep

grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that
range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of

most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many
such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the

imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the
ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable

thirst.
The river canons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth

while than most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the
choice of streets, not very well determined by their names. There

is always an amount of local history to be read in the names of
mountain highways where one touches the successive waves of

occupation or discovery, as in the old villages where the
neighborhoods are not built but grow. Here you have the Spanish

Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,

--easy to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that;
Mist Canon and Paddy Jack's. The streets of the west Sierras

sloping toward the San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the
east, my country, a day's ride carries one to the lake regions.

The next day reaches the passes of the high divide, but whether one
gets passage depends a little on how many have gone that road

before, and much on one's own powers. The passes are steep and
windy ridges, though not the highest. By two and three thousand

feet the snow-caps overtop them. It is even possible to wind
through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line,

but one misses a great exhilaration.
The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out

into long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a

distance, but the near-bygranite bulk glitters with the terrible
keen polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems.

When those glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain,
you conceive how long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.

Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best
time to go up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the

merely idle or sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and
understanding, the best time is when you have the longest leave to

stay. And here is a hint if you would attempt the stateliest
approaches; travel light, and as much as possible live off the

land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will not bring you the
favor of the woodlanders.

Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness;
this for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of

granite buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I
say, though some are easier going, leads each to the cloud

shouldering citadel. First, near the canon mouth you get the
low-heading full-branched, one-leaf pines. That is the sort of

tree to know at sight, for the globose, resin-dripping cones
have palatable, nourishing kernels, the main harvest of the

Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing accommodatingly
below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valleyward

slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts with
the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon

the wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here
begins the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the

sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to
the sleek, ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet,

burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-
red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower

pine borders. One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild
honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir

of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot. The roar
of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at

night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is worth
watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.

One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain