I suppose such an atmospheric effect is to be accounted for by a lower stratum of pure, transparent air overlaid by an upper one so charged with moisture (or perhaps one of those thus-far-unexplained dry mists occasionally seen in the high Sierra) as to intercept the blue rays of sunlight, and admit only softened yellow ones.
This is the true Mount Whitney, the one we named in 1864, and upon which the name of our chief is forever to rest. It stands, not like white Shasta, in a grandeur of solitude, but about it gather companies of crag and spire, piercing the blue or wrapped in monkish raiment of snowstorm and mist. Far below, laid out in ashen death, slumbers the desert.
Silence reigns on these icy heights, save when scream of Sierra eagle or loud crescendo of avalanche interrupts the frozen stillness, or when in symphonic fulness a storm rolls through vacant cañons with its stern minor. It is hard not to invest these great, dominating peaks with consciousness, difficult to realize that, sitting thus for ages in presence of all nature can work of light-magic and color-beauty, no inner spirit has kindled, nor throb of granite heart once responded, no Buddhistic nirvana-life, even, has brooded in eternal calm within these sphinx-like breasts of stone.
A week after my climb I lay on the desert sand at the foot of the Inyo Range and looked up at Mount Whitney, realizing all its grand individuality, and saw the drifting clouds interrupt a sun-brightened serenity by frown after frown of moving shadow; and I entered for a moment deeply and intimately into that strange realm where admiration blends with superstition, that condition in which the savage feels within him the greatness of a natural object, and forever after endows it with consciousness and power. For a moment I was back in the Aryan myth days, when they saw afar a snowy peak, and called it Dhavalagiri (white elephant), and invested it with mystic power.
These peculiar moments, rare enough in the life of a scientific man, when one trembles on the edge of myth-making, are of interest, as unfolding the origin and manner of savage beliefs, and as awakening the unperishing germ of primitive manhood which is buried within us all under so much culture and science.
How generally the myth-maker has been extinguished in modern students of mountains may be realized by examining the tone of Alpine literature, which, once lifted above the fatiguing repetition of gymnastics, is almost invariably scientific.
Ruskin alone among prose writers on the Alps re-echoes the dim past, in ever-recurring myth-making, over cloud and peak and glacier; his is the Rigveda’s idea of nature. The varying hues which mood and emotion forever pass before his own mental vision mask with their illusive mystery the simple realities of nature, until mountains and their bold, natural facts are lost behind the cloudy poetry of the writer.
Ruskin helps us to know himself, not the Alps; his mountain chapters, although essentially four thousand years old, are, however, no more an anachronism than the dim primeval spark which smoulders in all of us; their brilliancy is that spark fanned into flame.
To follow a chapter of Ruskin by one of Tyndall is to bridge forty centuries and realize the full contrast of archaic and modern thought.
This was the drift of my revery as I lay basking on the hot sands of Inyo, realizing fully the geological history and hard, materialistic reality of Mount Whitney, its mineral nature, its chemistry; yet archaic impulse even then held me, and the gaunt, gray old Indian who came slowly toward me must have subtly felt my condition, for he crouched beside me and silently fixed his hawk eye upon the peak.