sharp air equally insisted on
the mountains. It was a strange and delicious double effect, a
contradiction of natural impressions, a negation of our right to
generalize from previous experience.

Always the trail wound up and up. Never was it steep; never did it
command an outlook. Yet we felt that at last we were rising, were
leaving the level of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the
high country.

Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clearings and gazed at us,
responding solemnly to our salutations. They dwelt in cabins and held
to agriculture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle. From them
we heard of the high country to which we were bound. They spoke of it
as you or I would speak of interior Africa, as something inconceivably
remote, to be visited only by the adventurous, an uninhabited realm of
vast magnitude and unknown dangers. In the same way they spoke of the
plains. Only the narrow pine-clad strip between the two and six
thousand feet of elevation they felt to be their natural environment.
In it they found the proper conditions for their existence. Out of it
those conditions lacked. They were as much a localized product as are
certain plants which occur only at certain altitudes. Also were they
densely ignorant of trails and routes outside of their own little
districts.

All this, you will understand, was in what is known as the low country.
The landscape was still brown; the streams but trickles; sage-brush
clung to the ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills.

But one day we came suddenly into the big pines and rocks; and that
very night we made our first camp in a meadow typical of the mountains
we had dreamed about.

VIII

THE PINES

I do not know exactly how to make you feel the charm of that first camp
in the big country. Certainly I can never quite repeat it in my own
experience.

Remember that for two months we had grown accustomed to the brown of
the California landscape, and that for over a week we had traveled in
the Inferno. We had forgotten the look of green grass, of abundant
water; almost had we forgotten the taste of cool air. So invariably
had the trails been dusty, and the camping-places hard and exposed,
that we had come subconsciously to think of such as typical of the
country. Try to put yourself in the frame of mind those conditions
would make.

Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or so up into a high ridge
countr