dom commanded by other glacial phenomena,
moraines however regular and artificial-looking, canyons however deep
or strangely modeled, rocks however high; but when they come to these
shining pavements they stop and stare in wondering admiration, kneel
again and again to examine the brightest spots, and try hard to account
for their mysterious shining smoothness. They may have seen the winter
avalanches of snow descending in awful majesty through the woods,
scouring the rocks and sweeping away like weeds the trees that stood
in their way, but conclude that this cannot be the work of avalanches,
because the scratches and fine polished strife show that the agent,
whatever it was, moved along the sides of high rocks and ridges and up
over the tops of them as well as down their slopes. Neither can they see
how water may possibly have been the agent, for they find the same
strange polish upon ridges and domes thousands of feet above the reach
of any conceivable flood. Of all the agents of whose work they know
anything, only the wind seems capable of moving across the face of the
country in the directions indicated by the scratches and grooves. The
Indian name of Lake Tenaya is "Pyweak"--the lake of shining rocks. One
of the Yosemite tribe, Indian Tom, came to me and asked if I could tell
him what had made the Tenaya rocks so smooth. Even dogs and horses, when
first led up the mountains, study geology to this extent that they gaze
wonderingly at the strange brightness of the ground and smell it, and
place their feet cautiously upon it as if afraid of falling or sinking.

In the production of this admirable hard finish, the glaciers in many
places flowed with a pressure of more than a thousand tons to the square
yard, planing down granite, slate, and quartz alike, and bringing out
the veins and crystals of the rocks with beautiful distinctness. Over
large areas below the sources of the Tuolumne and Merced the granite is
porphyritic; feldspar crystals in inch or two in length in many places
form the greater part of the rock, and these, when planed off level with
the general surface, give rise to a beautiful mosaic on which the happy
sunbeams plash and glow in passionate enthusiasm. Here lie the brightest
of all the Sierra landscapes. The Range both to the north and south of
this region was, perhaps, glaciated about as heavily, but because the
rocks are less resisting, their polished surfaces have mostly given way
to the weather, l