Mr. Palmer and I revisited the spot, and, having tied our mules, descended through a circular hole to the cavern’s mouth. An archway of black lava sixty feet wide by eighty high, with a floor of lava sand and rough bowlders, led under the basalt in a northerly direction, preserving an incline not more than the gentle slope of the country. Our roof overhead could hardly have been more than twenty or thirty feet thick. We followed the cavern, which was a comparatively regular tube, for half or three-quarters of a mile. Now and then the roof would open up in larger chambers, and the floor be cumbered with huge piles of lava, over which we scrambled, sometimes nearly reaching the ceiling. Fresh lava-froth and smooth blister-holes lined the sides. Innumerable bats and owls on silent wing floated by our candles, fanning an air singularly still and dense.

After a cautious scramble over a long pile of immense basalt blocks, we came to the end of the cave, and sat down upon piles of débris. We then repeated an experiment, formerly made by Brewer and myself, of blowing out our candle to observe the intense darkness, then firing a pistol that we might hear its dull, muffled explosion.

The formation of this cave, as explained in Professor Whitney’s Geological Report, is this: “A basalt stream, flowing down from Shasta, cooled and hardened upon the surface, while within the mass remained molten and fluid. From simple pressure the lava burst out at the lower end, and, flowing forth, left an empty tube. Wonderfully fresh and recent the whole confused rock-walls appeared, and we felt, as we walked and climbed back to the opening and to daylight, as if we had been allowed to travel back into the volcano age.”

One more view of Shasta, obtained a few days later from Well’s ranch on the Yreka road, seems worthy of mention. From here the cone and side crater are in line, making a single symmetrical form with broad, broken summit singularly like Cotopaxi.

You look over green meadows and cultivated fields; beyond is a chain of little volcanoes girdling Shasta’s foot, for the most part bare and yellow, but clouded in places with dark forest, which a little farther up mantles the broad, grand cone, and sweeps up over ridge and cañon to alpine heights of rock and ice.

Strange and splendid is the evening effect from here, when shadow over base and light upon summit divide the vast pile into two zones of blue-purple and red-gold. We watched the colors fade and the peak recede farther and dimmer among darkness and stars.

XIII
MOUNT WHITNEY
1871

There lay between Carson and Mount Whitney a ride of two hundred and eighty miles along the east base of the Sierra. Stage-driving, like other exact professions, gathers among its followers certain types of men and manners, either by some mode of natural selection, or else after a Darwinian way developing one set of traits to the exclusion of others. However interesting it might be to investigate the moulding power of whip and reins, or to discover what measure of coachman there is latent in every one of us, it cannot be questioned that the characters of drivers do resemble one another in surprising degree. That ostentatious silence and self-contained way of ignoring one’s presence on the box for the first half hour, the tragi-comic, just-audible undertone in which they remonstrate with the swing team, and such single refrain of obsolete song as they drone and drone a hundred times, may be observed on every coach from San Diego to Montana.

So I found it natural enough that the driver, my sole companion from Carson to Aurora, should sit for the first hour in a silence etiquette forbade me to violate. His team, by strict attention to their duties, must have left his mind quite free, and I saw symptoms of suppressed sociability within forty minutes of our departure.

The nine-mile house, if my memory serves, was his landmark for taciturnity, for soon after passing it he began to skirmish along a sort of picket line of conversation. To the wheel mares he remarked, “Hot, gals; ain’t it, tho’?” and to his off leader, who strained wild eyes in every direction for something to become excited about, “Look at him, Dixie; wouldn’t you like a rabbit to shy at?”