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212 Motoring in the High Sierras
storm-tinted at summit, and dark where,
swooping down from ragged cliff, the rocks
plunge over canyon walls into blue, silent
gulfs."
Behind stood "the West chain, a great
mural ridge watched over by heights . . .
defining against the western sky a multitude
of peaks and spires. Bold buttresses
jut out through fields of ice and reach
down stone arms among snow and debris.
North and south of us the higher, or eastern,
summit stretched on in miles and miles
of snow-peaks, the farthest horizon still
crowded with their white points.
"The two halves of this view, both in
sight at once, express the highest, the
most acute, aspects of desolation—inanimate
forms out of which something living
has gone forever. From the desert have
been dried up and blown away its seas.
Their shores and white, salt-strewn bottoms
lie there in the eloquence of death.
A crude mountain bridge spanning the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus.
Sharp, white light glances from all the
mountain walls, where in marks and polishings
has been written the epitaph of
glaciers now melted and vanished into air.
Vacant canyons lie open to the sun, bare,
treeless, half-shrouded with snow, cumbered
with loads of broken debris, still as
graves, except when flights of rocks rush
down some chasm's throat, startling the
mountains with harsh, dry rattle, their
fainter echoes from below followed too
quickly by dense silence."