Once we tarried on the brink of a wild canon.  Midnight and silence seemed to slumber there:  the moon flooded one half the mysterious gulf with light, revealing a slender waterfall whose plash was faintly heard:  it served only to make the silence more profound.  Near at hand the torn and ragged earth, robbed of its treasure, looked painful even in that softening light.  On the dark side of the canon, in among the trees, a flame danced.  I saw the gaunt forms of rough-clad men gathered about the camp-fire, and beyond them a rude cabin of un-barked logs, looking cheerful enough in the rosy light.

There was nothing lovelier than this or more characteristic in the glorious ride over the Sierras—­not even the lake, above whose green shores we rushed with half a mountain between us; nor the ice-gorges, nor the black forests, nor the chaos of rock and ravine that has defied the humanizing touch of time.  I felt the burden of the mountains then, and it is for ever associated with a memory of the high Sierras, caught and fixed as we swept onward into the wild, wide snow-lands.

The burden of the mountains:  There shall come a day when the ravine for the silver is drained and the gold-seekers turn from thee disconsolate, but thy years are unnumbered and thy strength unfailing:  the grass shall cover thy nakedness and the pine-boughs brood over thee for ever and ever; the clouds shall visit thee and the springs increase; the snows shall gather in the clefts of thy bosom; thy breasts shall give nourishment, thy breath life to the fainting, and the sight of thy face joy.  The people shall go up to thee and build in thy shadow; their flocks shall feed in peace:  out of thy days shall come fatness, and out of thy nights rest, for thou hast that within thee more precious than silver, yea, better than much fine gold.

When the burden was past I looked out into the night.  A soft wind was stirring; I scented the balsam of the piny woods; the moon had descended beyond the crest of the mountain, and above me the sky was flooded with pale and palpitating stars.  We slid out of the mountains into the broad Humboldt desert one cloudless day:  it was like getting on the roof of the world—­the great domed roof with its eaves sloping away under the edges of heaven, and whereon there is nothing but a matting of sagebrush, looking like grayish moss, and a deep alkali dust as white and as fine as flour.

There were but two features in the landscape on which to fix the eye, and these were infrequent—­the dusty beds of the dead rivers and the wind-sculptured rocks.  It was the abomination of desolation:  the air was thin, but spicy; the sky was bare.  When we had followed with eager glance the shadow-like gazelle in his bounding flight, and brought the heavy-headed buffalo to a momentary stand, with his small evil eye fixed upon us, he wheeled suddenly and disappeared in a cloud of dust; and we were alone in the desert.