their bondage in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather
in their youth, were only a blessing.

Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice
and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away
beneath the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered
and pure, in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that
they give birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun,
full-grown and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River
issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two
thirds of the volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on
the east side of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate
base.

To find the big spring of the McCloud, or "Mud Glacier," which you
will know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you
make your way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a
shaggy growth of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river
flowing in a gorge of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava
plain. Should the volume of the stream where you strike it seem
small, then you will know that you are above the spring; if large,
nearly equal to its volume at its confluence with the Pitt River, then
you are below it; and in either case have only to follow the river up
or down until you come to it.

Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may
not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in