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Show BY PATH AND TKAIL. 27 such wild and imposing appearance. The absence of all sound was startling, and the sense of isolation oppres sive. Tennyson's lines in his " Dream of Fair Women, " visited me : < < There was no motion in the dumb, dead air, Nor any song of bird or sound of rill. Gross darkness of the inner sepulchre Was not so deadly still." In heaven or on earth there was not a sound to break the uncanny stillness, save alone the solitary call of some vagrant bird which but made the silence more severe. Three miles to westward were the cones of the Sierras thrown up and distorted by refraction into airy, fantas tic shapes which, at times, altered their outlines like unto a series of dissolving views. Above them all, high in air; rose the Pico de Navajas, now veiled in a drifting cloud of fleecy whiteness, but soon to come out and stand clear cut against a sapphire sky. Here and there the moun tains were cleft apart by some Titanic force, leaving deep, narrow gorges and wild ravines, where sunlight never enters and near which the eye is lost in the twilight of a soft purple haze. With a field glass I swept the ter rifying solitude, and the landscape, expanded by the lens, now grew colossal. Around me, and afar off, in this des olation of silence and loneliness, stood in isolated majes ty, weird architectural figures, as if phantoms of the imagination had materialized into stone. Huge irregu lar shafts and bowlders of granite and gneissoid, left standing after the winds and rains had dissolved the softer sand and limestones, assumed familiar, but in |