about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay
nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have
the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted
grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill
countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the
pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars,
and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
harm.

They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and
the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the
water nor the snow.

The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention
in storm processes. Weather does not happen. It is the visible
manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void. It gathers itself
together under the heavens; rains, snows, yearns mightily in wind,
smiles; and the Weather Bureau, situated advantageously for that very
business, taps the record on his instruments and going out on the
streets denies his God, not having gathered the sense of what he has
seen. Hardly anybody takes account of the fact that John Muir, who knows
more of mountain storms than any other, is a devout man.

Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds came walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents that
roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air, drawing
a veil about those places where they do their work. If their meeting or
parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets
the splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles hig