and by the choking snows of its widespread fountains. Now, with
volume tenfold increased beyond its springtime fullness, it took its
place as leader of the glorious choir.

And the winds, too, were singing in wild accord, playing on every tree
and rock, surging against the huge brows and domes and outstanding
battlements, deflected hither and thither and broken into a thousand
cascading, roaring currents in the canyons, and low bass, drumming
swirls in the hollows. And these again, reacting on the clouds, eroded
immense cavernous spaces in their gray depths and swept forward the
resulting detritus in ragged trains like the moraines of glaciers. These
cloud movements in turn published the work of the winds, giving them
a visible body, and enabling us to trace them. As if endowed with
independent motion, a detached cloud would rise hastily to the very top
of the wall as if on some important errand, examining the faces of the
cliffs, and then perhaps as suddenly descend to sweep imposingly along
the meadows, trailing its draggled fringes through the pines, fondling
the waving spires with infinite gentleness, or, gliding behind a grove
or a single tree, bringing it into striking relief, as it bowed and
waved in solemn rhythm. Sometimes, as the busy clouds drooped and
condensed or dissolved to misty gauze, half of the Valley would be
suddenly veiled, leaving here and there some lofty headland cut off from
all visible connection with the walls, looming alone, dim, spectral, as
if belonging to the sky--visitors, like the new falls, come to take part
in the glorious festival. Thus for two days and nights in measureless
extravagance the storm went on, and mostly without spectators, at least
of a terrestrial kind. I saw nobody out--bird, bear, squirrel, or man.
Tourists had vanished months before, and the hotel people and laborers
were out of sight, careful about getting cold, and satisfied with views
from windows. The bears, I suppose, were in their canyon-boulder dens,
the squirrels in their knot-hole nests, the grouse in close fir groves,
and the small singers in the Indian Canyon chaparral, trying to keep
warm and dry. Strange to say, I did not see even the water-ouzels,
though they must have greatly enjoyed the storm.

This was the most sublime waterfall flood I ever saw--clouds, winds,
rocks, waters, throbbing together as one. And then to contemplate what
was going on simultaneously with all this in other mountain temples;