Yosemite Fall
itself. Here language ceases and art quite fails. No words nor paintings, not even the photogram itself, can reproduce one tithe of the grandeur here enthroned. A cataract from heaven to earth, plunging from the clouds of the sky to bury itself among the trees of the forest. The loftiest waterfall yet known upon the face of the globe.
Don't mention figures yet, please. When a man is overwhelmed with the sublime, don't plunge him into statistics. By and by, when we have cooled down to a safe pitch, we may condescend to hear the calm calculator project his inexorable mathematics into the very face of nature's sublimity and triumphantly tell us just how great this surpassing wonder is. But after all his exactest calculations, his absolute measurements and his positive assurances, one feels how small the fraction of real greatness which figures can express or the intellect apprehend. A cataract half a mile high, setting its forehead against the stars and planting its feet at the base of the eternal hills. Gracefully swaying from side to side in rhythmical vibration, swelling into grandeur in earlier spring, and shrinking into beauty under the ardency of summer heat; towering far above all other cataracts, it calmly abides, the undisputed monarch of them all.
A half mile is no exaggeration, for the official measurement of the State Survey makes the height two thousand six hundred and forty-one (2,641) feet—a full half mile, and one foot more.
The fall is not in one unbroken, perpendicular sheet, but in three successive leaps. In the upper fall, the stream slides over a huge rounded lip or edge of polished granite, and falls one thousand five hundred and eighty-seven feet in one tremendous plunge. Here its whole volume thunders upon a broad shelf or recess, whence it rushes in a series of roughly-broken cascades down a broken slope of over seven hundred feet in linear measurement, but whose base is six hundred and twenty-six feet perpendicularly below its top. From the bottom of this broken slope it makes a final plunge of four hundred and twenty-eight feet in one clear fall, and then slides off contentedly into the restful shadows of the welcoming forests below.
Its width, like that of all snow-fed streams, varies greatly with the season. In March or April, when the tributary snows are melting most rapidly, and myriads of streamlets swell its volume, the stream is from seventy-five to a hundred feet wide, where it suddenly slips over the smoothly-rounded granite at its upper brink. During the same season it scatters or spreads to a width of from three to four hundred feet, when it breaks upon the rocky masses below.
In later spring, or earlier summer, it dwindles to less than a third of its greatest bulk; and its most intimate friend, the veteran Yosemite pioneer, Hutchings, tells us that he has seen it when it hardly seemed more than a silver thread winding down the face of the cliff. Under a full moon, the element of weirdness mingles with its graceful grandeur, shrouds it with mystery, and transports one into a soft and dreamy wonder-land, from which he cares not to return.
A mile further on our way back toward the western end, brings us under, or in front of, the triple rocky group, or three-peaked stone-mountain, whose name, the