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Show 275. "scaling c l i f f s for p l e a s u r e . " He sympathized with them because they were so b e a u t i f u l l y suited to t h e i r mountain environment, but "Anxiety to observe accurately on so rare an opportunity checked enthusiasm." When he described them, they appeared as flowing p a r t s of Nature. He marked the "flowing undulations of t h e i r firm-braided limbs; t h e i r strong straight legs, . . . t h e i r graceful rounded necks, the upsweeping cycloidal curve of t h e i r noble horns." Their image was remarkably similar to the hardly veiled f i c t i o n a l Muir in Theresa Yelverton's novel, Zanita: "a l i t h e figure, . . . skipping over the rough boulders, poising with the balance of an athlete, or s k i r t i n g a shelf of rock with the cautious activity of a goat, never losing for a moment the rhythmic motion of his f l e x i b l e form." He had much in common with these sheep, but he did not intend to write a heroic s e l f - p o r t r a i t. The sheep were the heroes of his mountains. Nature's hand was open to her mountaineers. They chose their meals from alpine gardens, r e l i s h i n g spicy leaves and shoots for "both t h e i r t a s t e and beauty." As Muir described the conditions of t h e i r l i v e s , he was attacking the narrow Darwinism which saw Nature as only a process of consumption and survival. When he said, "tame men are slow to suspect wild sheep of seeing more than g r a s s , " he was making the same point that Henry James would l a t e r i n s i s t upon, that the "modern deification of survival per se . . . with the denial of substantive exellence in what survives . . . is surely the strangest i n t e l l e c t u a l stopping place ever proposed by one |