Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of
our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."
That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
translation of any Scripture of Nature.
We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
height,--a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
_spiculae_--they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.
There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
five miles.
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