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Show 214. sign that "Yosemite granite is well plumbed & dovetailed." The lesson was clear enough; the mountains were built on a firm foundation. He satirized Whitney's "violent hypothesis" by showing the consequences to the humans who believed that mountains were insubstantial. As in Revelations, men without faith hid themselves. Muir reported their fear and trembling to Emerson: "vertical animals are mostly in consternation. Two or three have fled." Worse, these degraded humans taught their children to fear: "A little girl of Hutchings cried terror-stricken in the night, 'Grandma! Grandma! Pray to God to Stop it.'" Ignoring the hand of God in Nature, no wonder vertical animals lost their balance; they could not dance to the subtle music. The hand of God never dropped anything, but it was not influenced by human fears. The falls sang unchanged, the frogs were not nervous, the owl continued his song, and when Muir met two violets up by Indian Canyon he stopped to ask them what they thought. Their answer, "It's all love," validated Muir's view by dramatizing the ongoing health of Yosemite. But what if Muir had been wrong and Whitney right? Despite his portrayal of himself as "not in doubt for one moment," another variant of his experience described the hard fist of fear at the pit of his stomach. Dancing under the walls in an earthquake despite his fears required that he fully believe his own theory of Yosemite's creation. As he wrote to Emerson, his enthusiasm carried him beyond fear. He repeated an invitation - "think how a whole Yosemite |