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Show 77. rising weird through the firs; past the glorious fall of Nevada. . . . All of this mountain wealth in one day! As his narrative accelerated, he began to capture the freedom of movement in his language. He was travelling Nature's glacial highways at her own pace, or even faster, passing waterfalls, transcending day and night, transcending his own human limitations, until he was able to measure the sublime landscape with his whole being. Now he could truly see. As he travelled upstream back into time and returned with renewed vision, he used the images of sun and moon to suggest the structure of his activity, the two sides of it. The sun, associated with the body, ruled the time of close observation, but Muir's body absorbed the light and carried him back into the shadowy world of the moon. Day and night merged as he ran through the mountains. As he moved through the flowing landscape, his joyful vision partook of the present, yet contained the depth of history that the canyon represented. Jeanne Carr had once quoted a passage from Tyndall's Hours of Exercise in the Alps, in a letter: "Much as I enjoy the work, I do not think I could have filled my days and hours in the alps with clambering alone. The climbing in many cases was a peg on which a thousand other 'exercises' were being hung." But Muir could not justify his own mountaineering in such mechanical terms. It is even more interesting to consider the possibility that Muir's barometer and clinometer had been gifts from Tyndall, as one writer suggests. In that case, |