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Show 114. five glaciers on Ritter as the symmetrical petals of a flower. Nature loved the number five. The black rock and white glaciers suggest a further significance because of their stark contrast. Shasta, for instance, was a fire and ice mountain, and its form represented the primal forces which made the earth. This archaic pattern of imagery is the yin-^yang, representing swirling shadow and sun of the cosmic mountain, which Peter Matthiessen has recognized in the landscape of the Himalaya. Ritter, Shasta, and all glacially carved mountains suggested the harmony of contrasting and yet complementary forces. Muir's own ascent of Ritter - his deliberate choice of a route on the North Face - led him through the darkness and into the light. His rebirth was determined by the structure of the mountain, which in turn embodied the glacial history of the Sierra. Mount Ritter was, as he argued in the Studies, "a kind of textbook" which had much to teach. Muir's choice to ascend the North Face was significant in itself, since, as he said in the Studies, "Every mountaineer and Indian knows that high mountains are more easily ascended on the south than on the north side." The steep north faces were directly above the glacial wombs, which lay in the northern amphitheaters. The climb of Ritter, then, represented a step further in Muir's journey toward the origin of the world. When he climbed onto the rock above Ritter's glacier, he was stepping back into Preglacial times, onto the oldest rocks of the Sierra, rocks which overlaid the granite of the Yosemite Valley and the |