And the winds, too, were singing in wild accord, playing
on every tree and rock, surging against the huge brows
and domes and outstanding battlements, deflected hither
and thither and broken into a thousand cascading,
roaring currents in the canyons, and low bass, drumming
swirls in the hollows. And these again, reacting
on the clouds, eroded immense cavernous spaces in
their gray depths and swept forward the resulting
detritus in ragged trains like the moraines of glaciers.
These cloud movements in turn published the work of
the winds, giving them a visible body, and enabling
us to trace them. As if endowed with independent
motion, a detached cloud would rise hastily to the
very top of the wall as if on some important errand,
examining the faces of the cliffs, and then perhaps
as suddenly descend to sweep imposingly along the
meadows, trailing its draggled fringes through the
pines, fondling the waving spires with infinite gentleness,
or, gliding behind a grove or a single tree, bringing
it into striking relief, as it bowed and waved in
solemn rhythm. Sometimes, as the busy clouds drooped
and condensed or dissolved to misty gauze, half of
the Valley would be suddenly veiled, leaving here
and there some lofty headland cut off from all visible
connection with the walls, looming alone, dim, spectral,
as if belonging to the sky—visitors, like
the new falls, come to take part in the glorious festival.
Thus for two days and nights in measureless extravagance
the storm went on, and mostly without spectators, at
least of a terrestrial kind. I saw nobody out—bird,
bear, squirrel, or man. Tourists had vanished
months before, and the hotel people and laborers were
out of sight, careful about getting cold, and satisfied
with views from windows. The bears, I suppose,
were in their canyon-boulder dens, the squirrels in
their knot-hole nests, the grouse in close fir groves,
and the small singers in the Indian Canyon chaparral,
trying to keep warm and dry. Strange to say,
I did not see even the water-ouzels, though they must
have greatly enjoyed the storm.
This was the most sublime waterfall flood I ever saw—clouds,
winds, rocks, waters, throbbing together as one.
And then to contemplate what was going on simultaneously
with all this in other mountain temples; the Big Tuolumne
Canyon—how the white waters and the winds
were singing there! And in Hetch Hetchy Valley
and the great King’s River yosemite, and in
all the other Sierra canyons and valleys from Shasta
to the southernmost fountains of the Kern, thousands
of rejoicing flood waterfalls chanting together in
jubilee dress.
Chapter 3
Snow-Storms
Copyrights
The Yosemite from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
