solemn darkness, how impressive is the music of a
choir of rills singing their way down from the snow to the river! And
when we call to mind that thousands of these rejoicing rills are
assembled in each one of the main streams, we wonder the less that our
Sierra rivers are songful all the way to the sea.

About sundown saw a flock of dun grayish sparrows going to roost in
crevices of a crag above the big snow-field. Charming little
mountaineers! Found a species of sedge in flower within eight or ten
feet of a snow-bank. Judging by the looks of the ground, it can hardly
have been out in the sunshine much longer than a week, and it is likely
to be buried again in fresh snow in a month or so, thus making a winter
about ten months long, while spring, summer, and autumn are crowded and
hurried into two months. How delightful it is to be alone here! How wild
everything is--wild as the sky and as pure! Never shall I forget this
big, divine day--the Cathedral and its thousands of cassiope bells, and
the landscapes around them, and this camp in the gray crags above the
woods, with its stars and streams and snow.

[Illustration: VIEW OF UPPER TUOLUMNE VALLEY, with arrow pointing to Mt
Ritter]

_September 8._ Day of climbing, scrambling, sliding on the peaks around
the highest source of the Tuolumne and Merced. Climbed three of the most
commanding of the mountains, whose names I don't know; crossed streams
and huge beds of ice and snow more than I could keep count of. Neither
could I keep count of the lakes scattered on tablelands and in the
cirques of the peaks, and in chains in the canyons, linked together by
the streams--a tremendously wild gray wilderness of hacked, shattered
crags, ridges, and peaks, a few clouds drifting over and through the
midst of them as if looking for work. In general views all the immense
round landscape seems raw and lifeless as a quarry, yet the most
charming flowers were found rejoicing in countless nooks and garden-like
patches everywhere. I must have done three or four days' climbing work
in this one. Limbs perfectly tireless until near sundown, when I
descended into the main upper Tuolumne valley at the foot of Mount
Lyell, the camp still eight or ten miles distant. Going up through the
pine woods past the Soda Springs Dome in the dark, where there is much
fallen timber, and when all the excitement of seeing things was wanting,
I was tired. Arrived at the main camp at nine o'clock, and soon was