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The Land of Little Rain-Part11_Mary Hunter Austin(1868-1934)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more



bloom than you can properly appreciate.

Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains,



water has the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the

shortest passage. Where the rifts are narrow, and some of



the Sierra canons are not a stone's throw from wall to wall, the

best trail for foot or horse winds considerably above the



watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers there is usually a

good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine woods, the



short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are sombre,

rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective to



the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black

pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and



strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter

Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges. For such



pictures the pine branches make a noble frame. Presently they

close in wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks,



giving up the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You

get a kind of impatience with their locked ranks, until you come



out lastly on some high, windy dome and see what they are about.

They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook



borders; up open swales of dribbling springs; swarm over old

moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about clean



still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting

to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain.



The spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than

frankincense, and trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.



No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact

they know no other. "Come," say the churches of the valleys,



after a season of dry years, "let us pray for rain." They would do

better to plant more trees.



It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die

out. Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing



wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They

have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the



high places. But the waters, the evidences of their power, that go

down the steep and stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered pools,



the young rivers swaying with the force of their running, they sing

and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it far



outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning towers

how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they



fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them

countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad



by them.

Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a



sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any,

are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking



asp. They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems

have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see



in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight of sagging

drifts.



Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are

delectable summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the



gray boulders; streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier

slips and make deep bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier



shafts and give themselves room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and

little grass of Parnassus in their golden checkered shadows; the



meadow is white with violets and all outdoors keeps the clock. For

example, when the ripples at the ford of the creek raise a clear



half tone,--sign that the snow water has come down from the heated

high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire. When it drops



off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas squirrel

tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial



gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint

of the nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it



flashes from Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it

to the westering peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds



begin. But down three thousand feet in the canon, where you stir

the fire under the cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour. It



goes on, the play of light across the high places, rosy, purpling,

tender, glint and glow, thunder and windy flood, like the grave,



exulting talk of elders above a merry game.

Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the



streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the

country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white



columbine. Around the amphitheatres of the lake regions and above

them to the limit of perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in






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