I did not long consider. I felt every moment that the soul of Summer was passing. I scented the ascending incense of smoking and crackling boughs. What a requiem was being chanted by all the tremulous and broken voices of Nature! Would I, could I, longer forbear to join the passionate and tumultuous _miserere_? It seemed that I could not, for gathering about me the voluminous furs of Siberia, I bade adieu to friends, not without some forebodings awakened by the admonitions of my elders, then, dropping all the folly of the world, like a monk I went silently and alone into the monastery of a Sierran solitude, resigned, trusting, prayerful. What an entering it was! With slow, devotional steps I approached the valley. There was a thin veil of snow over the upper trail. It was smooth and unbroken as I came upon it, following the blazed trees in my way. Footprints of bear and fox, squirrel and coyote, were traceable. The owl hooted at me, and the jay shot past me like a blue flash of light, uttering her prolonged, shrill cry. As for the owl, I could not see him, but I heard him at startling intervals give the challenge, "Who are you?" so I advanced and gave the countersign. I don't believe it was for his grave face alone that the owl was chosen symbol of Wisdom. Not too soon came the steep and perilous descent into the abysmal depths of the mountain fastness. It is a shame that pilgrims who come up thither do not time their steps so as to reach this _Ultima Thule_ of old times and ways at sunset. Then the magnificence of the spectacle culminates. That new world below there is illuminated with the soft tints of Eden. What unutterable fullness of beauty pervades all. The forests--those moss-like fields are forests, and mighty ones, too--are all aflame with the burnished gold of sunset, brightening the gold of autumn; for gold twice refined, as it were, gilds the splendid landscape. Only think of that picture, shining through the mellow haze of Indian Summer, and flashing with the lambent glimmer of a myriad glassy leaves. You can not see them moving, yet they twinkle incessantly, and the warm air trembles about them while you hang bewildered from a toppling parapet, four thousand feet above them; birds swing under you in mid-air, streams leap from the sharp cliff, and reel in that sickening way through the air that your brain whirls after them. One is tired, anyhow, by the time he has reached this far, and a night camp in the cool rim of this world-to-come is just the panacea for any sort of weariness.