Before I had gone a mile from camp, I came to the foot of a
white cascade that beats its way down a rugged gorge in the canon wall,
from a height of about nine hundred feet, and pours its throbbing waters
into the Tuolumne. I was acquainted with its fountains, which,
fortunately, lay in my course. What a fine traveling companion it proved
to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountain's
own joy! Gladly I climbed along its dashing border, absorbing its divine
music, and bathing from time to time in waftings of irised spray.
Climbing higher, higher, now beauty came streaming on the sight: painted
meadows, late-blooming gardens, peaks of rare architecture, lakes here
and there, shining like silver, and glimpses of the forested middle
region and the yellow lowlands far in the west. Beyond the range I saw
the so-called Mono Desert, lying dreamily silent in thick purple
light--a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished
granite. Here the waters divide, shouting in glorious enthusiasm, and
falling eastward to vanish in the volcanic sands and dry sky of the
Great Basin, or westward to the Great Valley of California, and thence
through the Bay of San Francisco and the Golden Gate to the sea.
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