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Show 417. Muir attempted to observe the moon from behind the falls. The view was "enchanting," and drew him too close, when the wind shifted, and the falls shifted, and Muir, in what he thought was fairyland, suffered sudden disenchantment. Down came a dash of spent comets, thin and harmless-looking in the distance, but desperately solid and stony in striking one's shoulders. It seemed like a mixture of choking spray and gravel. Instinctively dropping on my knees, I laid hold on an angle of the rock, rolled myself together with my face pressed against my breast, and in this attitude submitted as best I could to my thundering baptism. This is certainly not an experience Muir would recommend to the tourist, yet it yielded a lesson the tourist needed to understand. Somebody had to get close enough to Yosemite Falls to learn with his whole body about the power and substance of falling water. Otherwise, the reader could not feel the power and substance of the forces which pour into and drift through Yosemite. Yet Muir continued to approach still closer to the cosmic vision. The third near view was all encompassing. Muir revised his early "Jubilee of Waters" and described the Valley as it became one great waterfall in the "full bloom of flood." This was the most sublime waterfall flood I ever saw - clouds, winds, rocks, waters, throbbing together as one. And then to contemplate what was going on simultaneously with all this in other mountain temples: |