stretching away northeast nearly in a continuous line with the main valley itself.
About one mile up this cañon towers Yosemite's sheerest and loftiest isolated cliff, the
Half-Dome
itself. It is a bare crest of naked granite, four thousand seven hundred and forty feet high, cleft straight down in one vast vertical front on the Tenaya, or northwest side, while on the back, that is, toward the southeast, it swells off and rounds away with a dome-like sweep that utterly dwarfs the grandeur of a thousand St. Peters in one.
Following still on up the Tenaya Cañon, nearly two miles beyond the dome, and a thousand feet higher, rises the
Clouds' Rest,
a granite ridge, long, bare and steep, having its axis parallel with that of the valley, and falling away along its southeastern slope into the rocky mountain wilderness of the High Sierras. This is one of the few points about the valley which the Geological Survey has not yet measured. They estimated its height one thousand feet above that of the Half Dome, which would make its summit ten thousand feet, or nearly two miles above the sea level.
Beyond this, little of note invites the traveler's delay, so we make our way northwesterly straight across this cañon from the base of its southeasterly wall toward that of the opposite cliff. On the way, however,
Mirror Lake
arrests and enchants us. Surely water reflections were never more perfect. The Indian name Ke-ko-too-yem, Sleeping Water, was never more happily bestowed. Imagine a perfect water mirror nearly eight acres in extent, and of a temperament so calm and deep and philosophic that it devotes its whole life to the profoundest reflection. A mile of solid cliff above, a mile of seeming solid cliff beneath; for though the mind knows the lower to be only an image, the eye cannot, by simple sight alone, determine which is the solid original and which the shadowy reflection.