I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and goes brawling by in rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white in the light, half in shadow.  As I look from the opening jaws of this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front—­high in the stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite.  On the left, sculptured from the main Cloud’s Rest ridge, are three magnificent rocks, sisters of the great South Dome.  On the right is the massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down in the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with forest.  In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is singing against boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams.  Now look back twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark background of shadow.  A little to the left, and a dozen steps this side of the fall, a flickering light marks my camp—­and a precious camp it is.  A huge, glacier-polished slab, falling from the smooth, glossy flank of Cloud’s Rest, happened to settle on edge against the wall of the gorge.  I did not know that this slab was glacier-polished until I lighted my fire.  Judge of my delight.  I think it was sent here by an earthquake.  It is about twelve feet square.  I wish I could take it home[4] for a hearthstone.  Beneath this slab is the only place in this torrent-swept gorge where I could find sand sufficient for a bed.

I expected to sleep on the boulders, for I spent most of the afternoon on the slippery wall of the canyon, endeavoring to get around this difficult part of the gorge, and was compelled to hasten down here for water before dark.  I shall sleep soundly on this sand; half of it is mica.  Here, wonderful to behold, are a few green stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass.  They are here to meet us.  Ay, even here in this darksome gorge, “frightened and tormented” with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow.  Can it be?  As if rubus and the grass leaf were not enough of God’s tender prattle words of love, which we so much need in these mighty temples of power, yonder in the “benmost bore” are two blessed adiantums.  Listen to them!  How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!  Good-night.  Do you see the fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and the rubus and grass panicles?  And do you hear how sweet a sleep- song the fall and cascades are singing?

The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the rocks kept my fire alive all through the night.  Next morning I rose nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form of climbing.  I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted; and here the canyon is all broadly open again—­the floor luxuriantly forested with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked libocedrus.  The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes down seven hundred feet in a white brush of foam.  This is a little Yosemite valley.  It is about two thousand feet above the level of the main Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.