第45章

THE VALLEY

Once upon a time I happened to be staying in a hotel room which had originally been part of a suite, but which was then cut off from the others by only a thin door through which sounds carried clearly.It was about eleven o'clock in the evening.

The occupants of that next room came home.Iheard the door open and close.Then the bed shrieked aloud as somebody fell heavily upon it.

There breathed across the silence a deep restful sigh.

"Mary," said a man's voice, "I'm mighty sorry Ididn't join that Association for Artificial Vacations.

They guarantee to get you just as tired and just as mad in two days as you could by yourself in two weeks."We thought of that one morning as we descended the Glacier Point Trail in Yosemite.

The contrast we need not have made so sharp.

We might have taken the regular wagon-road by way of Chinquapin, but we preferred to stick to the trail, and so encountered our first sign of civilization within an hundred yards of the brink.It, the sign, was tourists.They were male and female, as the Lord had made them, but they had improved on that idea since.The women were freckled, hatted with alpines, in which edelweiss--artificial, I think --flowered in abundance; they sported severely plain flannel shirts, bloomers of an aggressive and unnecessary cut, and enormous square boots weighing pounds.The men had on hats just off the sunbonnet effect, pleated Norfolk jackets, bloomers ditto ditto to the women, stockings whose tops rolled over innumerable times to help out the size of that which they should have contained, and also enormous square boots.The female children they put in skin-tight blue overalls.The male children they dressed in bloomers.Why this should be I cannot tell you.All carried toy hatchets with a spike on one end built to resemble the pictures of alpenstocks.

They looked business-like, trod with an assured air of veterans and a seeming of experience more extended than it was possible to pack into any one human life.We stared at them, our eyes bulging out.They painfully and evidently concealed a curiosity as to our pack-train.We wished them good-day, in order to see to what language heaven had fitted their extraordinary ideas as regards raiment.They inquired the way to something or other--I think Sentinel Dome.We had just arrived, so we did not know, but in order to show a friendly spirit we blandly pointed out A way.It may have led to Sentinel Dome for all I know.They departed uttering thanks in human speech.

Now this particular bunch of tourists was evidently staying at the Glacier Point, and so was fresh.But in the course of that morning we descended straight down a drop of, is it four thousand feet? The trail was steep and long and without water.During the descent we passed first and last probably twoscore of tourists, all on foot.A good half of them were delicate women,--young, middle-aged, a few gray-haired and evidently upwards of sixty.There were also old men, and fat men, and men otherwise out of condition.Probably nine out of ten, counting in the entire outfit, were utterly unaccustomed, when at home where grow street-cars and hansoms, to even the mildest sort of exercise.They had come into the Valley, whose floor is over four thousand feet up, without the slightest physical preparation for the altitude.They had submitted to the fatigue of a long and dusty stage journey.And then they had merrily whooped it up at a gait which would have appalled seasoned old stagers like ourselves.Those blessed lunatics seemed positively unhappy unless they climbed up to some new point of view every day.

I have never seen such a universally tired out, frazzled, vitally exhausted, white-faced, nervous community in my life as I did during our four days'

stay in the Valley.Then probably they go away, and take a month to get over it, and have queer residual impressions of the trip.I should like to know what those impressions really are.

Not but that Nature has done everything in her power to oblige them.The things I am about to say are heresy, but I hold them true.

Yosemite is not as interesting nor as satisfying to me as some of the other big box canons, like those of the Tehipite, the Kings in its branches, or the Kaweah.I will admit that its waterfalls are better.Otherwise it possesses no features which are not to be seen in its sister valleys.And there is this difference.In Yosemite everything is jumbled together, apparently for the benefit of the tourist with a linen duster and but three days' time at his disposal.He can turn from the cliff-headland to the dome, from the dome to the half dome, to the glacier formation, the granite slide and all the rest of it, with hardly the necessity of stirring his feet.Nature has put samples of all her works here within reach of his cataloguing vision.Everything is crowded in together, like a row of houses in forty-foot lots.The mere things themselves are here in profusion and wonder, but the appropriate spacing, the approach, the surrounding of subordinate detail which should lead in artistic gradation to the supreme feature--these things, which are a real and essential part of esthetic effect, are lacking utterly for want of room.

The place is not natural scenery; it is a junk-shop, a storehouse, a sample-room wherein the elements of natural scenery are to be viewed.It is not an arrangement of effects in accordance with the usual laws of landscape, but an abnormality, a freak of Nature.