As you stand at the base of those cool walls of granite that rise to the clouds from the green floor of Yosemite, a beautiful park, carpeted with verdure, expands from your feet. Vast and stately pines band with their shadows the sunny reaches of the pure Merced. An arch of blue bridges over from cliff to cliff. From the far summit of a wall of pearly granite, over stains of purple and yellow,—leaping, as it were, from the very cloud,—falls a silver scarf, light, lace-like, graceful, luminous, swayed by the wind. The cliffs’ repose is undisturbed by the silvery fall, whose endlessly varying forms of wind-tossed spray lend an element of life to what would otherwise be masses of inanimate stone. The Yosemite is a grace. It is an adornment. It is a ray of light on the solid front of the precipice.
From Yosemite our course was bent toward the Merced Obelisk. An afternoon in early July brought us to camp in the self-same spot where Cotter and I had bivouacked in the storm more than two years before. I remembered the crash and wail of those two dreary nights, the thunderous fulness of tempest beating upon cliffs, and the stealthy, silent snow-burial; and perhaps to the memory of that bitter experience was added the contrasting force of to-day’s beauty.
A warm afternoon sun poured through cloudless skies into one rocky amphitheatre. The little alpine meadow and full, arrowy brook were flanked upon either side by broad, rounded masses of granite, and margined by groups of vigorous upland trees: firs for the most part, but watched over here and there by towering pines and great, aged junipers whose massive red trunks seemed welded to the very stone.
It was altogether exhilarating; even Little Billy, the gray horse, found it so, and devoted more time to practical jokes upon thick-headed mules than to the rich and tempting verdure; nor did the high, cool air banish from his tender heart a glowing Platonic affection for our brown mare Sally.
To the ripened charms of middle age Sally united something more than the memory of youth; she was remarkably plump and well-preserved; her figure firm and elastic, and she did not hesitate to display it with many little arts. In presence of her favored Billy she drew deep sighs, and had quite an irresistible fashion of turning sadly aside and moving away among trees alone, as if she had no one to love her—a wile never failing to bring him to her side and elicit such attention as smoothing her mane or even a pressure of lips upon her brow. And woe to the emotional mule who ventured to cross our little meadow just to feel for a moment the soft comfort of her presence. With the bitterness of a rejected suit he always bore away shoe-prints of jealous Billy.
He led her quietly down to the brook, and never drank a drop until the mare was done; then they paid a call at camp, nosing about among the kettles with familiar freedom, nibbling playfully at dish-towel and coffee-pot, and when we threw sticks at them trotted off as closely as if they had been harnessed together. In quiet, moonlit hours, before I went to bed, I saw them still side by side, her head leaning over his withers; Billy at qui vive staring dramatically with pointed ears into forest depths, a true and watchful guardian.
A little reconnoitring had shown us the most direct way to the Obelisk, whose sharp summit looked from the moraine to west of us as grand and alluring as we had ever thought it.
There was in our hope of scaling this point something more than mere desire to master a difficult peak. It was a station of great topographical value, the apex of many triangles, and, more than all, would command a grander view of the Merced region than any other summit.
July eleventh, about five o’clock in the afternoon, Gardiner and I strapped packs upon our shoulders. My friend’s load consisted of the Temple transit, his blanket, and a great tin cup; mine was made up of field-glass, compass, level, blanket, and provisions for both, besides the barometer, which, as usual, I slung over one shoulder.
For the first time that year we found ourselves slowly zigzagging to and fro, following a grade with that peculiarly deliberate gait to which mountaineering experience very soon confines one. Black firs and thick-clustered pines covered in clumps all the lower slope, but, ascending, we came more and more into open ground, walking on glacial débris among trains of huge bowlders and occasional thickets of slender, delicate young trees. Emerging finally into open granite country, we came full in sight of our goal, whose great western precipice rose sheer and solid above us.