In “The Yosemite,” also, we learn how a true nature-lover can meet the terrors of an earthquake. He was awakened at about two o’clock one moonlit morning by a “strange, thrilling motion,” and exalted by the certainty that he was going to find the old planet off guard and learn something of her true nature, he rushed out while the ground was rocking so that he had to balance himself as one does on shipboard during a heavy sea. He saw Eagle Rock fall in a thousand boulder-fragments, while all the thunder he had ever heard was condensed in the roar of that moment when it seemed that “the whole earth was, like a living creature, calling to its sister planets.”
“Come, cheer up!” he cried to a panic-stricken man who felt that the ground was about to swallow him up; “smile and clap your hands now that kind Mother Earth is trotting us on her knee to amuse us and make us good.”
He studied the earthquake as he studied the glaciers, the scarred cliffs, and the flowers, and this is the lesson that it taught him:
All Nature’s wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring waves, and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort—each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature’s heart.
Read about his adventure in a storm on the Alaska glacier with the little dog, Stickeen. You will note that he had eyes not only for the ice-cliffs towering above the dark forest and
