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Show 569 this plant is more important to the narrative than the climb to the summit. Why? Winter and summer, you may hear her voice, the low, sweet melody of her purple bells. No evangel among all the mountain plants speaks Nature's love more plainly than cassiope. Where she dwells, the redemption of the coldest solitude is complete. The very rocks and glaciers seem to feel her presence, and become imbued with her own fountain sweetness. Here is an angelic and emblematic flower speaking the message Muir had wanted to hear: the world is not a desert, but is saturated with light. Hearing cassiope brings the final enlightenment of his first summer and allows him to say with certainty, "how delightful it is to be alone here! How wild everything is, - wild as the sky and as pure!" At seventy-four years of age, Muir knew this had drawn him to the mountains, a promise of purity and wholeness. He learned that he could immerse himself over and over in the realm of Nature and not want for more. Though he would never learn all the answers to his life's problems, yet he had learned that he did not have to reason his way through the world. "The charms of these mountains are beyond all common reason, unexplainable and mysterious as life itself." He could never exhaust, and never explain, the mysteries of the mountains. After all, he was not a prophet, he was only a man. The twentieth century would bring historians and ecologists who would attempt to write the critique of modern technological |