But to return to the storm.  Toward the evening of the 18th it began to wither.  The snowy skirts of the Wahsatch Mountains appeared beneath the lifting fringes of the clouds, and the sun shone out through colored windows, producing one of the most glorious after-storm effects I ever witnessed.  Looking across the Jordan, the gray sagey slopes from the base of the Oquirrh Mountains were covered with a thick, plushy cloth of gold, soft and ethereal as a cloud, not merely tinted and gilded like a rock with autumn sunshine, but deeply muffled beyond recognition.  Surely nothing in heaven, nor any mansion of the Lord in all his worlds, could be more gloriously carpeted.  Other portions of the plain were flushed with red and purple, and all the mountains and the clouds above them were painted in corresponding loveliness.  Earth and sky, round and round the entire landscape, was one ravishing revelation of color, infinitely varied and interblended.

I have seen many a glorious sunset beneath lifting storm clouds on the mountains, but nothing comparable with this.  I felt as if new-arrived in some other far-off world.  The mountains, the plains, the sky, all seemed new.  Other experiences seemed but to have prepared me for this, as souls are prepared for heaven.  To describe the colors on a single mountain would, if it were possible at all, require many a volume—­purples, and yellows, and delicious pearly grays divinely toned and interblended, and so richly put on one seemed to be looking down through the ground as through a sky.  The disbanding clouds lingered lovingly about the mountains, filling the canyons like tinted wool, rising and drooping around the topmost peaks, fondling their rugged bases, or, sailing alongside, trailed their lustrous fringes through the pines as if taking a last view of their accomplished work.  Then came darkness, and the glorious day was done.

This afternoon the Utah mountains and valleys seem to belong to our own very world again.  They are covered with common sunshine.  Down here on the banks of the Jordan, larks and redwings are swinging on the rushes; the balmy air is instinct with immortal life; the wild flowers, the grass, and the farmers’ grain are fresh as if, like the snow, they had come out of heaven, and the last of the angel clouds are fleeing from the mountains.

VIII

Bathing in Salt Lake[10]

When the north wind blows, bathing in Salt Lake is a glorious baptism, for then it is all wildly awake with waves, blooming like a prairie in snowy crystal foam.  Plunging confidently into the midst of the grand uproar you are hugged and welcomed, and swim without effort, rocking and heaving up and down, in delightful rhythm, while the winds sing in chorus and the cool, fragrant brine searches every fiber of your body; and at length you are tossed ashore with a glad Godspeed, braced and salted and clean as a saint.