, from the summit of the pass, which is more than seven
thousand feet above the sea, higher than the famous pass of
the Splugen, or the little St. Bernard, to look off and down
upon an immense expanse. He expects, or, if he had not learned
beforehand, he would anticipate with eagerness, that he should
be able to see mountain summits beneath him, and beyond these,
valleys and ridges alternating till the hills subside into
the eastern plains. How different the facts that await the
eye from the western summit, and what a surprise! We find, on
gaining what seems to be the ridge, that the Sierra range
for more than a hundred miles has a double line of jagged
pinnacles, twelve or fifteen miles apart, with a trench or
trough between, along a portion of the way, that is nearly
fifteen hundred feet deep if we measure from the pass which
the stages traverse, which is nearly three thousand feet deep
if the plummet is dropped from the highest points of the snowy
spires.
Down into this trench we look, and opposite upon the eastern
wall and crests, as we ride out to the eastern edge of the
western summit. In a stretch of forty miles the chasm of it
bursts into view at once, half of which is a plain sprinkled
with groves of pine, and the other half an expanse of level
blue that mocks the azure into which its guardian towers
soar. This is Lake Tahoe, an Indian name which signifies "High
Water." We descend steadily by the winding mountain-road, more
than three miles to the plain, by which we drive to the shore
of the Lake; but it is truly Tahoe, "High Water." For we stand
more than a mile, I believe more than six thousand feet above
the sea, when we have gone down from the pass to its sparkling
beach. It has about the same altitude as the Lake of Mount
Cenis (6280 feet) in Switzerland, and there is only one sheet
of water in Europe that can claim a greater elevation (Lake
Po de Vanasque, 7271 feet). There are several, however, that
surpass it in the great mountain-chains of the Andes and of
Hindustan. The Andes support a lake at 12,000 feet above
the sea, and one of the slopes of the Himalaya, in Thibet,
encloses and upholds a cup of crystal water 15,600 feet above
the level of the Indian Ocean, covering an area, too, of 250
square miles. I had supposed, however, that within the
im