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Page 27
Captain Jack's cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It
measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is
littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and
startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The
sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and
eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.
Where the lava meets the lake there are some fine curving bays,
beautifully embroidered with rushes and polygonums, a favorite resort
of waterfowl. On our return, keeping close along shore, we caused a
noisy plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The
ducks, less wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out
through openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising
spangles in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less
and less forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet
rocks, looked like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald
mosses appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft
of small ferns. From year to year in the kindly weather the beds are
thus gathering beauty--beauty for ashes.
Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is
soon back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash
Creek and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the
mountain. They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of down-
grinding ice, pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of the
work they are doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very unlike
the long, majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding down
the valleys through the forests to the sea. These, with a few others
as yet nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers that
occupied the canyons now taken by the rivers, and in a few centuries
will, under present conditions, vanish altogether.
The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on
the peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again
and again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their
sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in
the season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue
again. But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small
tributary streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath
the sky of rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous
volume from seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if
their bondage in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather
in their youth, were only a blessing.
Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice
and snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away
beneath the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered
and pure, in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that
they give birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun,
full-grown and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River
issues from a large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two
thirds of the volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on
the east side of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate
base.
To find the big spring of the McCloud, or "Mud Glacier," which you
will know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you
make your way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a
shaggy growth of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river
flowing in a gorge of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava
plain. Should the volume of the stream where you strike it seem
small, then you will know that you are above the spring; if large,
nearly equal to its volume at its confluence with the Pitt River, then
you are below it; and in either case have only to follow the river up
or down until you come to it.
Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may
not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in
the form of a partially interrupted sheet nearly seventy-five yards in
width, and at a height above the riverbed of about forty feet, as
nearly as I could make out without the means of exact measurement.
For about fifty yards this flat current is in one unbroken sheet, and
flows in a lacework of plashing, upleaping spray over boulders that
are clad in green silky algae and water mosses to meet the smaller
part of the river, which takes its rise farther up. Joining the river
at right angles to its course, it at once swells its volume to three
times its size above the spring.
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