We started without a guide, and when half the ascent was completed, lost the track. After some time spent in vainly seeking it, we laid the reins upon our horses' necks, and commended ourselves to their sagacity. They did not immediately bear us to our destination without guidance, although they must have known every pebble in the route; they started straight down hill, fast. With some difficulty we put them about, and eventually invented a way of our own to the summit.
I had carefully abstained from spoiling the effect of the final coup d'œil by studying the panorama in detail as we ascended. Lavishly was my patience rewarded. Far as the eye could reach on every side stretched a confused sea of keen-crested rocky billows. Ridge behind rugged ridge rose up, and bluff behind leonine bluff appeared like mountains couchant. Peak towered over peak, from the vast iron helmets near at hand to the thin, blue, palpitating spectres of hills upon the verge of the horizon; from Devil's Point and Fremont's granite roof away to Imperial Shasta "diademed with circling snow," queen of them all. And grim as sentinels, keeping a silent watch throughout all time over the pine-shut valleys, they reared their furrowed brows far up above the clouds that sought to veil their majesty, but only lay a wreath of snowy fleece about their mighty shoulders. The world lay below us. What solitudes were there not there, what distances, what joyous mood, what melancholy, what fields of light, what cloud-cast drifting wastes of shadow! Beside hollows of lapis-lazuli, brimming with golden haze, might be seen gulfs of sullen gloom; through the mantle of purple pines showed flanks of naked stone. Even summer noon but half beguiled the scene of its savage character.
"There was wide wandering for the greediest eye."
Yonder was Emerald Bay; the Sacramento Valley there; there ran the railways, covered in for miles and miles by snow-sheds. Elsewhere two forest fires headed by columns of smoke crept on their devastating march. And in the distance, in the midst of all this wild scenery, like a great opal upon the iron bosom of the Sierras, slept crystal Tahoe beneath hazy curtains, its gray and silver ripples shivering in cold light, and winking through the atmospheric dimness with countless rapid flashes.
Here, reader, upon the extreme summit of Tinkler's Nob, I purpose to abandon you: you must find your own way down. Shin met us when we returned half baked to the verandah. He said that he had changed his mind about going up, and if we cared to turn round and repeat the ascent, he would now come with us.
What followed was but a repetition of what had gone before. On the next day we started to return to Emigrant Gap, and parting there from Shin, the pleasantest of companions and hosts, sped on to San Francisco.
CHAPTER IV. A GLIMPSE OF SONORA.
"At what time does the stage start for Magdalena?" I inquired of the bar-tender at the "Metropolitan Hotel," Tucson, where the Southern Pacific Railway had just landed me.