To go up that last eleven hundred feet and stand upon the flat rock at the summit of Mount Lowe is to get a picture so wonderful it cannot be described with this poor human vocabulary. It must be lived. On a pure, clear day one looks down this sixty-one hundred feet, more than a mile, into the orange belt of Southern California. It spreads out below in one great mosaic of turquoise and amber and emerald, where the miles seem like inches, and where his field-glass sweeps one panoramic picture of a hundred miles or more.
Just below is Pasadena and Los Angeles. To the westward perhaps forty miles is the blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean, on westward the faint outlines of Catalina Islands. The ocean seems so close one could throw a pebble over into it. How a mountain does reduce distances. You throw the pebble and it falls upon your toes!
And Mount Lowe is but a shelf on the side of the higher Sierras. The granite mountains rise higher to the northward, and to the east rises "Old Baldy," twelve thousand feet high and snow eternally on his head.
This is one of the workshops of the infinite!
All alone I scrambled up that three-mile trail to the summit. All alone I stood upon the flat rock at the summit and looked down into the swimming distances. I did not know why I had struggled up into that mountain sanctuary, for I was not searching for sublimity. I was searching for relief. I was heartsick.
I saw clouds down in the valley below me. I had never before looked down upon clouds. I thought of the cloud that had covered me in the valley below, and dully watched the clouds spread wider and blacker.
Afterwhile the valley was all hidden by the clouds. I knew rain must be falling down there. The people must be saying, "The sun doesn't shine. The sky is all gone." But I saw the truth—the sun was shining. The sky was in place. A cloud had covered down over that first mile. The sun was shining upon me, the sky was all blue over me, and there were millions of miles of sunshine above me. I could see all this because I had gone above the valley. I could see above the clouds.
A great light seemed to break over my stormswept soul. I am under the clouds of trouble today, BUT THE SUN IS SHINING!
I must go on up the mountain to see it.
The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path, I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and God forever in His heavens.