What are the ways in which Muir’s discourse might be described as ‘progressive’ and ‘unlimited’? Two key features are narrative and metaphor. Even as he prepared to give the facts and figures of the movements of his stakes in the Mt McClure glacier which proved that the living glaciers of the high Sierra were moving at one inch each day, Muir launched into a mystery narrative, vivid with detail, lively in analogy, seductive in alliteration and powerfully rhythmic:
One of the yellow days of last October, when I was among the mountains of the Merced group, following the footprints of the ancient glaciers that once flowed grandly from their ample fountains, reading what I could of their history as written in moraines and canyons and lakes and carved rocks, I came upon a small stream that was carrying mud I had not before seen.
Ending this sentence with a slightly formal inversion enables Muir to produce the rhyme that sets up the mystery: ‘stream’/’seen’.
In his personal narratives Muir frequently exclaims aloud: ‘Before I had time to reason I said, “Glacier Mud! – mountain meal!”’ The dramatic effect of this on the page has actually been enhanced by Badè’s addition of the quotation and exclamation marks. It is worth remembering that Muir developed a reputation for oral dramatic story-telling that must have been symbiotic with his written narrative sense. Ronald Limbaugh has brilliantly shown that Muir integrated not only his reading, but his oral story-telling with what we have in print in the case of the story of Stickeen. (See Gifford 1996, page 893ff, for a memoir of Muir’s ‘wonderful story-telling ability’.) So, as the narrative unfolds, mud leads to a terminal moraine, above which is snow, on which are lines of stones clearly moving in curves and ‘I shouted, “A living glacier!”’ The Berkeley scientist LeConte had mistrusted Muir’s sample of glacier ice that he had sent him years before, so Muir ‘determined to collect proofs of the common measured arithmetical kind’ which in this letter/article/paper he goes on provide. Of course, what Muir’s measurements revealed was a narrative much more important than that of personal discovery, solving a mystery, or correcting the sceptical professionals of his day who clung to a belief that Yosemite Valley was formed by a single seismic cataclysm. Muir’s is the fundamental narrative demonstrated from different data by Darwin, that creation is still ongoing.