The shining barrenness
of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome
which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any
metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the
Alleghany chain.
Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's
immediate margin,--getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,--we came at
last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.
This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.
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