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Show 152. than the obvious." The living rocks of Yosemite: the scientist had been taught not to invest them with consciousness. But Muir knew that the rocks themselves were alive, and his perspective was likely to be dismissed by the scientific community. Clarence King, for instance, had learned to banish such ideas from his mind. After climbing Mount Whitney he said, It is hard not to invest these great dominating peaks with consciousness, difficult to realize that, sitting thus for ages in presence of all nature can work, of light-magic and color-beauty, no inner spirit has kindled, nor throb of granite heart once responded, no Buddhistic nirvana-life even had brooded in eternal calm within these sphinx-like breasts of stone. King had been proud of his ability to resist such mythologizing impulses; he sacrificed his soul to gain the objectivity of detachment. He looked at Mount Whitney, saw a hard materialistic reality and no more. But everything in Muir called out that he acknowledge the powerful spirit of the mountains. A year before he climbed Whitney, Muir wrote in his journal, "Glaciers move in tides. So do mountains, so do all things." So when he looked up from the Owens Valley on the day after he climbed Whitney in October of 1873, his perceptions were quite different from the ones King had felt only a month before. He reveled in the rich colors of sky and rock, as they shaded magically into each other, orange, blue, crimson, and chocolate. Muir had not studied the resources of primitive, ancient, |