The shades of twilight were darkening the amphitheatre as we plodded homeward; ghostly cliffs and dim towers were hardly recognizable as defined against the evening sky, in which already a few pale stars shone tremulously.
I spare the reader the days of snow and sleet we spent under a temporary shelter constructed of blankets. I pass over the elaborate system of rivulets, which forever burrowed new channels and originated future geography under our tent. These were quickly forgotten the morning of the clear-up, as we quitted our camp under the shadow of the 1871 peak, and marched southwestward down the bowlder-strewn valley of our brook.
A fine series of lateral moraines flank this cañon on the left, moraines rising one above another in defined terraces, for the most part composed of granite blocks, but here and there of solid rock in situ, where the ridge throws out prominent spurs.
We ascended the north wall, zigzagging to and fro among pines, till, having climbed a thousand feet, we found ourselves upon a plateau of granite sand, among groves of pinus flexilis, which seemed (as to me the sequoias always have) the relics of a past climatic condition, the well-preserved octogenarians of the forest. Through open groves of these giant trees, whose red, gnarled trunks and dark green foliage stood out with artistic definition upon bare granite sand, we saw the deep cañon of the Kern a few miles to our left, and beyond it, swelling in splendid rank against the west, my old friends, the Kaweah peaks, their dark, pyramidal summits here and there touched with flashing ice-banks.
The bottom of Kern Cañon was hidden from us; its craggy edges broken and rounded by glacial action, and in part built upon by the fragments of great moraines, were especially powerful; and as a master’s sketch emphasizes the leading lines, so here each sharply carved ravine or rock-rift is given force by lines of almost black pines. Startled bands of deer looked timidly at us for a moment, and then bounded wildly away through the woods. All else was silent and motionless.
At evening we entered the long-hoped-for cañon, and threaded our way up among moraines and forest close to the foot of Mount Whitney, the peak itself rising grandly across the amphitheatre’s head, every spire and rocky crevice brought sharply out in the warm evening sunlight. With my field-glass I could see that it was a simple, brief walk of a few hours to the summit, and, all anxiety at rest, I lay down on my blankets to watch the effects of light.
As often as one camps at twelve thousand feet in the Sierra, the charm of crystally pure air, these cold, sparkling, gem-like tints of rock and alpine lake, the fiery bronze of foliage, and luminous though deep-toned sky, combine to produce an intellectual and even a spiritual elevation. Deep and stirring feelings come naturally, the present falls back into its true relation, one’s own wearying identity shrinks from the broad, open foreground of the vision, and a calmness born of reverent reflections encompasses the soul.
At eleven o’clock next morning Knowles and I stood together on the topmost rock of Mount Whitney. We found there a monument of stones, and records of the two parties who had preceded us,—the first, Messrs. Hunter and Crapo, and afterward, that of Rabe of the Geological Survey. The former were, save Indian hunters, the first, so far as we know, who achieved this dominating summit. Mr. Rabe has the honor of the first measurement by barometer. Our three visits were all within a month.
The day was cloudless, and the sky, milder than is common over these extreme heights, warmed to a mellow glow and rested in softening beauty over minaret and dome. Air and light seemed melted together; even the wild rocks springing up all about us wore an aspect of aërial delicacy. Around the wide panorama, half low desert, half rugged granite mountains, each detail was observable, but a uniform, luminous medium toned, without obscuring, the field of vision. That fearful sense of wreck and desolation, of a world crushed into fragments, of the ice chisel which, unseen, has wrought this strange mountain sculpture, all the sensations of power and tragedy I had invariably felt before on high peaks, were totally forgotten. It was the absolute reverse of the effect on Mount Tyndall, where an unrelenting clearness discovered every object in all its power and reality. Then we saw only unburied wreck of geologic struggles, black with sudden shadow or white under searching focus, as if the sun were a great burning-glass, gathering light from all space, and hurling its fierce shafts upon spire and wall.
Now it was like an opal world, submerged in a sea of dreamy light, down through whose motionless, transparent depths I became conscious of sunken ranges, great hollows of undiscernible depth, reefs of pearly granite as clear and delicate as the coral banks in a tropical ocean. It was not like a haze in the lower world, which veils away distance in softly vanishing perspective; there was no mist, no vagueness, no loss of form nor fading of outline—only a strange harmonizing of earth and air. Shadows were faint, yet defined, lights visible, but most exquisitely modulated. The hollow blue which over Tyndall led the eye up into vacant solitudes was here replaced by a sense of sheltering nearness, a certain dove-colored obscurity in the atmosphere which seemed to filter the sunlight of all its harsher properties. I do not permit myself to describe details, for they have left no enduring impression, nor am I insensible of how vain any attempt must be to reproduce the harmony of such subtle aspects of nature—aspects most rare and indescribable because producing their charm by negative means.