Swami Vivekananda at Mount Lowe

Echo Mountain House Funicular, Mount Lowe. Swami Vivekananda, second row, fifth from left. 9 “ ‘Tomorrow if it be fine,’ Miss MacLeod had written on December 15 to Sister Nivedita, ‘Mr. & Mrs. Baumgardt, Swami, & I go to Mount Lowe where there is a fine observatory, and we shall have a rare sight looking through the telescope—& do some fine excursions in the neighborhood, returning home here about 5 on Sunday afternoon.’ As it had happened December 16 had not been fine, and the outing had been postponed. It was not until the second weekend in January that Swamiji made the trip up Mount Lowe, a high peak of the San Gabriel Range that rose just northeast of Pasadena.” 10 Sister Gargi remarks: “In a photograph taken unquestionably at Mount Lowe (not, as has generally been supposed, in Switzerland), one sees Swamiji standing in the very center of a funicular-load of excursionists and looking, at the moment, none too happy. The people around him are unidentified, but just behind his right shoulder appears a man whose photograph resembles one of Mr. Baumgardt. The funicular is about to ascend the first steep slope of the mountain by way of the Great Cable Incline, a track that climbed straight up for a dizzy half mile to Echo Summit—a small plateau from which one could halloo once and be answered by the friendly mountains thirteen times.” 11 The group stayed overnight on Echo Summit in the Echo Mountain House on Saturday, January 13 and descended the mountain the next day, Sunday, January 14. This photograph must have been taken on Saturday the thirteenth. ❊ ❊ ❊ Man is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but the center is located in one spot; and God is an infinite circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose center is everywhere. He works through all hands, sees through all eyes, walks on all feet, breathes through all bodies, lives in all life, speaks through every mouth, and thinks through every brain. (CW [1976] 2:33)