Page:Alaska days with John Muir.djvu/27

Rh his last handful of plants, and hastened up to where I stood. "Man!" he said, "I was forgetting. We'll have to hurry now or we'll miss it, we'll miss it." "Miss what?" I asked.

"The jewel of the day," he answered; "the sight of the sunset from the top." Then Muir began to slide up that mountain. I had been with mountain climbers before, but never one like him. A deer-lope over the smoother slopes, a sure instinct for the easiest way into a rocky fortress, an instant and unerring attack, a serpent-glide up the steep; eye, hand and foot all connected dynamically; with no appearance of weight to his body—as though he had Stockton's negative gravity machine strapped on his back. Fifteen years of enthusiastic study among the Sierras had given him the