length. By cool efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the
upper end in a little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second
night in the gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short
pencil-letter in my notebook:--


The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the
great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and
swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with
snow. I am now only a mile from last night's camp; and have been
climbing and sketching all day in this difficult but instructive
gorge. It is formed in the bottom of the main canyon, among the
roots of Cloud's Rest. It begins at the filled-up lake basin where
I camped last night, and ends a few hundred yards above, in another
basin of the same kind. The walls everywhere are craggy and
vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is only from twenty
to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken enough, the
thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was eroded,
for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.

I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and
goes brawling by in rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white
in the light, half in shadow. As I look from the opening jaws of
this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front--high in the
stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body
gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left,
sculptured from the main Cloud's Rest ridge, are three magnificent
rocks, sisters of the great South Dome. On the right is the
massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down in
the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with