OCR Text |
Show 174 laborious student can decipher even the most emphasized passages of the original manuscript. From this, the most elaborate and concrete version of the palimpsest, it is clear that Muir was no longer assembling the slides or comparisons which would allow him to classify glacial phenomena like Agassiz, but was travelling the path of natural history from the summits to the foothills of the Sierra. Seen through this revised metaphor, Nature was not just a Book, but was a myriad of paths. The glaciers wrote their own history, but they also carved paths of life. The blank pages of rock, the rich soils: these were their legacy. The gleaming Sierran granites comprised a blank page of history. Muir observed the wonderfully fresh glacial polish on the pavements in the middle Sierra. It seemed so perfect, he imagined that the glaciers had scarcely left. That "strange brightness of the ground" was their finishing touch, a sure sign of their dominant influence on the land. A mountaineer "stoops and rubs his hand admiringly on these shining surfaces, and tries hard to account for their mysterious smoothness." He noticed that "only the wild mountain sheep seems to move wholly at ease upon these glistening pavements," for only the sheep has travelled these rocks for generations. If a man wished to learn about processes which took thousands of years, he could not read them in a moment. Like the mountain sheep, he would have to live in this realm, but follow its myriad paths back and forth. |