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After my last visitor went to bed, I lay down on the moraine in front of the cabin and gazed and watched. Hour after hour the wonderful arch stood perfectly motionless, sharply defined and substantial-looking as if it were a permanent addition to the furniture of the sky.
He could have tossed a pebble into it, seven-thousand feet below, where the white foaming river came ramping through a great pile of moraine that dammed up this end of the Pass to the width of a bridle trail. The outlaws would have to cross the lake to escape from the Pass; and almost, he thought, he saw the old punt at the far end, which Wayland had said hunters sometimes used.
The fall would have been only one hundred feet, but it would have closed me out as effectually as one thousand, therefore I respected the distance accordingly, and was glad when the trip was done. A moraine is an ugly thing to assault head-first.
And when we bear in mind that all the present forests of the Sierra are young, growing on moraine soil recently deposited, and that the flank of the range itself, with all its landscapes, is new-born, recently sculptured, and brought to the light of day from beneath the ice mantle of the glacial winter, then a thousand lawless mysteries disappear, and broad harmonies take their places.
The party pushed on beyond the moraine to a hill of considerable height, which gave a fine view of the country toward Mount Aymon and the so-called Asses' Ears. They brought back a variety of game, but their most interesting scientific acquisitions were boulders from the moraine scored with glacial characters, and shells from the salt pool.
Only upon the head waters of the Carson have I found this species established on good moraine soil. Here it flourishes with the Silver and Two-leaved Pines, in great beauty and luxuriance, attaining a height of from forty to sixty feet, and manifesting but little of that rocky angularity so characteristic a feature throughout the greater portion, of its range.
I reached the ship at 2.30 P.M. I had intended getting back at noon and sending letters and bidding friends good-bye, but could not resist this glacier saunter. The ship moved off as soon as I was seen on the moraine bluff, and Loomis and I waved our hats in farewell to the many wavings of handkerchiefs of acquaintances we had made on the trip.
The following springtime I spent making studies in that classic neighborhood, especially in a favorite haunt of Lowell's, the "Waverley Oaks," a curious group of large white oaks, which had taken root some hundreds of years ago on the foot of a moraine of one of the offsets of the great glacier which, countless thousands of years ago, had covered New England.
Aristor of Moraine, that is cousin to the Lord of the Moors that you slew, warreth upon your mother, and hath carried off your sister by force into the castle of a vavasour of his, and saith that he will take her to wife and will have all her land that your mother ought to hold of right, maugre your head.
A bulging ridge near the top I discovered was formed of ice, a remnant of the glacier when it stood at this elevation which had been preserved by moraine material and later by a thatch of dwarf bushes and grass. Next morning at daybreak I pushed eagerly back over the comparatively smooth eastern margin of the glacier to see as much as possible of the upper fountain region.
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