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Show 107 a microscope, and my limbs moved with a positiveness and precision with which I seemed to have nothing at all to do. Had I been borne aloft upon wings, my deliverance could not have been more complete. It is no accident that Muir found himself writing this entire section in the passive voice, since he wished to suggest a kind of dual consciousness. The climb happened to him. He could only observe the phenomenon. Here he approached the nearest possible view of the High Sierra, seen as through a microscope, while his body embraced the mountain. He was not certain what force had assumed control. Perhaps the spirit of science was nearby, since he read the face of the rock as through a microscope. Perhaps in discovering the rifts and flaws of the rock, he had read the cleavage of pure rock, untouched by glaciers because it was above them. That was the basis of his theory that in Sierran architecture, "the style always proclaims the nature of the rock." Or the new sense might have been given by a guardian angel, since he had seemed to receive a sign the night before, when "two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of flame." He had noted in his copy of Emerson, "in your path there is always an angel." Or perhaps, as he suggested in a rewritten version of this awakening, his body, "finding the ordinary dominion of mind insufficient, pushed it aside." If that were the case, the body itself was a gate to vision, since in that variant he saw "every rift, flaw, niche, and tablet in the cliff." [Italics mine] The tablet suggests that |