The Streets of the Mountain

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These streets of the mountain are not highways but byways well-travelled by water and animals and other mountain dwellers.

Mary Austin’s prose evokes the glory, power, and spirituality of nature. Streets of the Mountain is excerpted from Austins Land of Little Rain (1903), an essay collection about the Californian landscape.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.