[Gutenberg 36336] • Gabriel Conroy

Excerpt from Gabriel Conroy: A Novel

Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach fifty miles, looking southward from the highest white peak. Filling ravines and gulches and dropping from the walls of canons in white shroud-like drifts, fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave, hiding the bases of giant pines and completely covering young trees and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the distant horizon., Snow lying everywhere over the California Sierras on the 15th day of March, 1848, and still falling.

It had been snowing for ten days; snowing in finely-granulated powder, in damp, spongy flakes, in thin, feathery plumes; snowing from a leaden sky steadily, snowing fiercely, shaken out of purple-black clouds in white flocculent masses, or dropping in long level lines like white lances from the tumbled and broken heavens. But always silently! The woods were so choked with it, the branches were so laden with it, it had so per-meated, filled and possessed earth and sky; it had so cushioned and muffled the ringing rocks and echoing hills that all sound was deadened. The strongest gust, the fiercest blast awoke no sigh or complaint from the snow packed rigid files of forest.