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Show 231. Muir portrayed himself as living through the whole geological history of Shasta while the storm sang. On the summit, Muir and his companion, Jerome Fay, were in the very place, at the very time of the beginning of Shasta's creation, on a patch of volcanic climate at what seemed like the beginning of an Ice Age. The mountain awakened in the storm. At its peak, it was as if "the fires of the old volcano were breaking forth again." Muir and his companion felt as if they had "lain castaway beneath all the storms of winter." Thus an overnight bivouac became a geological excursion from the beginning of Shasta's history through its glacial age, dramatized as the men warmed themselves at the hissing fuming fumaroles of the summit which Muir regarded as "the last feeble expression of that vast volcanic energy that builded the mountain." So he could link his own life to that of the dormant volcano. The ordinary sensations of cold give but faint conceptions of that which comes on after hard exercise, with want of food and sleep, combined with wetness in a high frost wind. Life is then seen to be a mere fire, that now smoulders, now brightens, showing how easily it may be quenched. The night passed like history.- slowly, "like a mass of unnumbered and half-forgotten years, in which all our other years and experiences were strangely interblended." Through the whole mystical night Muir portrayed himself as neither losing faith in the fair play nor the beauty of Nature, unlike Jerome, who though an equally competent mountaineer |