Sometimes Bob rode up into the pass.  More often he tied his horse and took the steep rough trail afoot.  The way was guarded by strange, distorted trees, and rocks carved into fantastic shapes.  Some of them were piled high like temples.  Others, round and squat, resembled the fat and obscene deities of Eastern religions.  There were seals and elephants and crocodiles and allegorical monsters, some of them as tiny as the grotesque Japanese carvings, others as stupendous as Egypt.  The trail led by them, among them, between them.  At their feet clutched snowbush, ground juniper, the gnarled fingers of manzanita, like devotees.  A foaming little stream crept and plunged over bare and splintered rocks.  Twisted junipers and the dwarf pines of high elevations crouched like malignant gnomes amongst the boulders, or tossed their arms like witches on the crags.  This bold and splintered range rose from the softness and mystery of the great pine woods on the lower ridge as a rock rises above cool water.

The pass itself was not over fifty feet wide.  Either side of it like portals were the high peaks.  It lay like the notch of a rifle sight between them.  Once having gained the tiny platform, Bob would sit down and look abroad over the wonderful Sierra.

Never did he tire of this.  At one eye-glance he could comprehend a summer’s toilsome travel.  To reach yonder snowy peak would consume the greater part of a week.  Unlike the Swiss alps, which he had once visited, these mountains were not only high, but wide as well.  They had the whole of blue space in which to lie.  They were like the stars, for when Bob had convinced himself that his eye had settled on the farthest peak, then still farther, taking half-guessed iridescent form out of the blue, another shone.

But his business was not with these distances.  Almost below him, so precipitous is the easterly slope of Baldy, lay canons, pine forests, lesser ridges, streams, the green of meadows.  Patiently, piece by piece, he must go over all this, watching for that faint blue haze, that deepening of the atmosphere, that almost imagined pearliness against the distant hills which meant new fire.

“Don’t look for smoke,” California John had told him.  “When a fire gets big enough for smoke, you can’t help but see it.  It’s the new fire you want to spot before it gets started.  Then it’s easy handled.  And new fire’s almighty easy to overlook.  Sometimes it’s as hard for a greenhorn to see as a deer.  Look close!”

So Bob, concentrating his attention, looked close.  When he had satisfied himself, he turned square around.

From this point of view he saw only pine forests.  They covered the ridge below him like a soft green mantle thrown down in folds.  They softened the more distant ranges.  They billowed and eddied, and dropped into unguessed depths, and came bravely up to eyesight again far away.  At last they seemed to change colour abruptly, and a brown haze overcast them through which glimmered a hint of yellow.  This Bob knew was the plain, hot and brown under the July sun.  It rose dimly through the mist to the height of his eye.  Thus, even at eight thousand feet, Bob seemed to stand in the cup of the earth, beneath the cup of the sky.