As for the Mormons one meets, however their doctrines be regarded,
they will be found as rich in human kindness as any people in all our
broad land, while the dark memories that cloud their earlier history
will vanish from the mind as completely as when we bathe in the
fountain azure of the Sierra.



IX

Mormon Lilies[11]


Lilies are rare in Utah; so also are their companions the ferns and
orchids, chiefly on account of the fiery saltness of the soil and
climate. You may walk the deserts of the Great Basin in the bloom
time of the year, all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the
snowy Wahsatch, and your eyes will be filled with many a gay malva,
and poppy, and abronia, and cactus, but you may not see a single true
lily, and only a very few liliaceous plants of any kind. Not even in
the cool, fresh glens of the mountains will you find these favorite
flowers, though some of these desert ranges almost rival the Sierra in
height. Nevertheless, in the building and planting of this grand
Territory the lilies were not forgotten. Far back in the dim geologic
ages, when the sediments of the old seas were being gathered and
outspread in smooth sheets like leaves of a book, and when these
sediments became dry land, and were baked and crumbled into the sky as
mountain ranges; when the lava-floods of the Fire Period were being
lavishly poured forth from innumerable rifts and craters; when the ice