From the lip I climbed a high point just to the east, getting a grand view down the cliff, where a broad, purple band defined the Yosemite spray line. There, too, I found unmistakable ice-striæ, showing that the glacier of Mount Hoffmann had actually poured over the brink. At the moments of such discovery, one cannot help restoring in imagination pictures of the past. When we stand by river-bank or meadow of that fair valley, looking up at the torrent falling bright under fulness of light, and lovely in its graceful, wind-swayed airiness, we are apt to feel its enchantment; but how immeasurably grander must it have been when the great, living, moving glacier, with slow, invisible motion, crowded its huge body over the brink, and launched blue ice-blocks down through the foam of the cataract into that gulf of wild rocks and eddying mist!
The one-eyed mule, Bonaparte, I found tied where I had left him; and, as usual, I approached him upon his blind side, able thus to get successfully into my saddle, without danger to life or limb. I could never become attached to the creature, although he carried me faithfully many difficult and some dangerous miles, and for the reason that he made a pretext of his half-blindness to commit excesses, such as crowding me against trees and refusing to follow trails. Realizing how terrible under reinforcement of hereditary transmission the peculiarly mulish traits would have become, one is more than thankful to Nature for depriving this singular hybrid of the capacity of handing them down.
Rather tired, and not a little bruised by untimely collision with trees, I succeeded at last in navigating Bonaparte safely to camp, and turning him over to his fellow, Pumpkinseed.
The nights were already very cold, our beds on frozen ground none of the most comfortable; in fact, enthusiasm had quite as much to do with our content as the blankets or Longhurst’s culinary art, which, enclosed now by the narrow limit of bacon, bread, and beans, failed to produce such dainties as thrice-turned slapjacks or plum-duffs of solemnizing memory.
One more geological trip finished my examination of this side of the great valley. It was a two days’ ramble all over the granite ridges, from the North Dome up to Lake Tenaya, during which I gathered ample evidence that a broad sheet of glacier, partly derived from Mount Hoffmann, and in part from the Mount Watkins Ridge and Cathedral Peak, but mainly from the great Tuolumne glacier, gathered and flowed down into the Yosemite Valley. Where it moved over the cliffs there are well-preserved scarrings. The facts which attest this are open to observation, and seem to me important in making up a statement of past conditions.
We were glad to get back at last to our two little cabins in the valley, although our serio-comic hangers-on, the Diggers, were gone, and the great fall was dry.
A rest of one day proved refreshing enough for us to leave camp and ascend by the Mariposa trail to Meadow Brook, where we made a bivouac, from which Gardiner began his southern boundary line, and I renewed my geological studies east of Inspiration Point.
I always go swiftly by this famous point of view now, feeling somehow that I don’t belong to that army of literary travellers who have here planted themselves and burst into rhetoric. Here all who make California books, down to the last and most sentimental specimen who so much as meditates a letter to his or her local paper, dismount and inflate. If those firs could recite half the droll mots they have listened to, or if I dared tell half the delicious points I treasure, it would sound altogether too amusing among these dry-enough chapters.
I had always felt a desire to examine Bridal Veil cañon and the southwest Cathedral slope. Accordingly, one fine morning I set out alone, and descended through chaparral and over rough débris slopes to the stream, which at this time, unlike the other upland brooks, flowed freely, though with far less volume than in summer. At this altitude only such streams as derive their volume wholly from melting snow dry up in the cold autumnal and winter months; spring-fed brooks hold their own, and rather increase as cold weather advances.
It was a wild gorge down which I tramped, following the stream-bed, often jumping from block to block, or letting myself down by the chaparral boughs that overhung my way. Splendid walls on either side rose steep and high, for the most part bare, but here and there on shelf or crevice bearing clusters of fine conifers, their lower slopes one vast wreck of bowlders and thicket of chaparral plants.