| OCR Text |
Show 76. Doing without, disciplining oneself; though it sounds rather puritanical, this regimen was necessary to the only experience Muir found valuable. If he wished to travel this path, he would have to follow Nature's rules and he would have to simplify his aims. There was only room enough for a man in Tenaya, not for an expedition. The next day he arrived at Tenaya Lake, which was frozen and transparent in the sunlight, manifesting "myriads of Tyndall's six rayed water flowers, magnificiently colored." These ice flowers reminded Muir of the days when the whole canyon he ascended was a mer de glace, and reminded him that the glaciation of Yosemite might be imagined not as a catastrophic epoch, but as a uniform flow of compacted snowflakes, snow flowers who slowly carved out the beautiful structures of a mountain mansion. After conditioning his mind and body by following the path of a glacier, he was able to return two days later for another excursion. He climbed around Half Dome and Cloud's Rest in one day, constantly moving and observing, making the most of his life: Not one of all the assembled rocks or trees seemed remote. . . . I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in jet shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome |
