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Show 369. or perhaps bee farmers could save their hives "by cutting roads back into the mountains, and taking them into the heart of the flowery chaparral. " Advocating this practice, Muir pointed out that "The Santa Lucia, San Rafael, San Gabriel, San Jacinto, and San Bernardino ranges are almost untouched as yet save by wild bees." These mountains, all named for saints, were of course spiritual resources: when he attempted to quilt together the ragged edges of the remaining Californian landscape, he was making one last attempt to repair a pastoral dream, where one could "Drift away confidingly into the broad gulf-streams of Nature, helmed only by Instinct." The neglected mountains of California indicated the Califomians' false perceptions about their State. At the conclusion of his essay, as Muir stood at the top of Mount San Antonio, he had a sort of vision from the summit of Pisgah. He had not expected a view of the promised land from the San Gabriel Mountains; "From base to summit all seemed gray barren, silent, its glorious chaparral appearing like dry moss creeping over its dull, wrinkled ridges and hollows." But strangely he found water on his excursion, and a flowery "impenetrable growth of honey bushes." From the summit he saw the "sage brush country . . . far as the eye could reach, the landscape was one vast bee-pasture." As promised land, it was not milk and honey by human standards, but "very little of it . . . desert in the eyes of a bee." A most interesting twist. If Muir began his essay by Ascribing the Central garden which California had turned into |