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Show 172 overlaid, yet interdependent. But as he came to the Sierra and evolved there, he had to change his views in order to see his environment clearly. Meanwhile he attempted to see the Sierra in pre-Californian terms. It was at first easy for him to read the glacial age as the first chapter of the Book of Nature, written on the same page, beneath later chapters. When he tried to write this vision, however, he seemed to be describing the glacial history as separate and abstracted from the present life of the Sierra. He spoke awkwardly in his first published essay on the glacial history of Yosemite. Two years ago, when picking flowers in the mountains back of Yosemite Valley, I found a book. It was blotted and storm-beaten; all of its outer pages were mealy and crumbly, the paper seemed to dissolve like the snow beneath which it had been buried; but many of the inner pages were well preserved, and though all were more or less stained and torn, whole chapters were easily readable. In this condition is the great open book of Yosemite glaciers today; its granite pages have been torn and blurred by the same storms that wasted the castaway book. Though Muir certainly did not intend it, his early effort to describe the glacial book of Yosemite's history bore a remarkable resemblance to Clarence King's perception of Mount Whitney as "ice-chiselled and storm-tinted, a great monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire." Both men suggested that the mountains themselves were ancient artifacts |