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Show 66. took him one step toward deeper questions. Since he could not study the glaciers as they created the Sierra, he had to apply another man's theory. He had to create a mental experiment, by imagining what glaciers would have done in the Sierra. So he began to see the landscape as a glacier might. He followed his imagination back into the wilderness, testing the glaciers of his mind against the canyons, cliffs, and domes, hoping that mind and matter would become one. He was no longer traversing the landscape in a random way, but blending into it, following its own laws. By September of 187 3, his studies had become a good deal more focused, and he had begun to investigate the importance of rock structure: No scientific book in the world can tell me how this Yosemite granite is put together or how it has been taken down. Patient observation and constant brooding above the rocks, lying upon them for years as the ice did, is the way to arrive at the truths which are graven so lavishly upon them. He had entered so completely the secret life of glaciers that he described his observations as if he was a patient brooding river of ice. He planned to demonstrate his sympathy to the landscape by wearing "tough grey clothes, the color of granite," and then he would "reproduce the ancient ice-rivers and . . . dwell with them." Given this kind of mystical comingling of himself with the history of the Sierra, it was only natural that he would also begin to describe himself as climbing down rocks like a glacier: |