[The Mountains of California by John Muir]@TWC D-Link book
The Mountains of California

CHAPTER X
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Those portions of the winds thus embodied can scarce be wholly invisible, even to the darkest imagination.

And when we look around over an agitated forest, we may see something of the wind that stirs it, by its effects upon the trees.

Yonder it descends in a rush of water-like ripples, and sweeps over the bending pines from hill to hill.

Nearer, we see detached plumes and leaves, now speeding by on level currents, now whirling in eddies, or, escaping over the edges of the whirls, soaring aloft on grand, upswelling domes of air, or tossing on flame-like crests.

Smooth, deep currents, cascades, falls, and swirling eddies, sing around every tree and leaf, and over all the varied topography of the region with telling changes of form, like mountain rivers conforming to the features of their channels.
After tracing the Sierra streams from their fountains to the plains, marking where they bloom white in falls, glide in crystal plumes, surge gray and foam-filled in boulder-choked gorges, and slip through the woods in long, tranquil reaches--after thus learning their language and forms in detail, we may at length hear them chanting all together in one grand anthem, and comprehend them all in clear inner vision, covering the range like lace.


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