At night Carley gazed over and into the black void. But for the awful
sense of depth she would not have known the Canyon to be there. A
soundless movement of wind passed under her. The chasm seemed a grave
of silence. It was as mysterious as the stars and as aloof and as
inevitable. It had held her senses of beauty and proportion in abeyance.
At another sunrise the crown of the rim, a broad belt of bare rock,
turned pale gold under its fringed dark line of pines. The tips of the
peak gleamed opal. There was no sunrise red, no fire. The light in the
east was a pale gold under a steely green-blue sky. All the abyss of
the Canyon was soft, gray, transparent, and the belt of gold
broadened downward, making shadows on the west slopes of the mesas and
escarpments. Far down in the shadows she discerned the river, yellow,
turgid, palely gleaming. By straining her ears Carley heard a low dull
roar as of distant storm. She stood fearfully at the extreme edge of a
stupendous cliff, where it sheered dark and forbidding, down and down,
into what seemed red and boundless depths of Hades. She saw gold spots
of sunlight on the dark shadows, proving that somewhere, impossible
to discover, the sun was shining through wind-worn holes in the sharp
ridges. Every instant Carley grasped a different effect. Her studied
gaze absorbed an endless changing. And at last she realized that sun and
light and stars and moon and night and shade, all working incessantly
and mutably over shapes and lines and angles and surfaces too numerous
and too great for the sight of man to hold, made an ever-changing
spectacle of supreme beauty and colorful grandeur.
She talked very little while at the Canyon. It silenced her. She had
come to see it at the critical time of her life and in the right mood.
The superficialities of the world shrunk to their proper insignificance.
Once she asked her aunt: "Why did not Glenn bring me here?" As if this
Canyon proved the nature of all things!
But in the end Carley found that the rending strife of the
transformation of her attitude toward life had insensibly ceased. It had
ceased during the long watching of this cataclysm of nature, this canyon
of gold-banded black-fringed ramparts, and red-walled mountains which
sloped down to be lost in purple depths. That was final proof of the
strength of nature to soothe, to clarify, to stabilize the tried and
weary and upward-gazing soul. Stronger than the recorded deeds of
saints, stronger than the eloquence of the gifted uplifters of
men, stronger than any words ever written, was the grand, brooding,
sculptured aspect of nature. And it must have been so because thousands
of years before the age of saints or preachers--before the fret
and symbol and figure were cut in stone--man must have watched with
thought-developing sight the wonders of the earth, the monuments of
time, the glooming of the dark-blue sea, the handiwork of God.