"I thank you. That's dear of you. I think I am something of a cat....
I'll be glad if this walk leads us often to the creek."
Spring might have been fresh and keen in the air, but it had not yet
brought much green to the brown earth or to the trees. The cotton-woods
showed a light feathery verdure. The long grass was a bleached white,
and low down close to the sod fresh tiny green blades showed. The great
fern leaves were sear and ragged, and they rustled in the breeze. Small
gray sheath-barked trees with clumpy foliage and snags of dead branches,
Glenn called cedars; and, grotesque as these were, Carley rather liked
them. They were approachable, not majestic and lofty like the pines, and
they smelled sweetly wild, and best of all they afforded some protection
from the bitter wind. Carley rested better than she walked. The huge
sections of red rock that had tumbled from above also interested Carley,
especially when the sun happened to come out for a few moments and
brought out their color. She enjoyed walking on the fallen pines, with
Glenn below, keeping pace with her and holding her hand. Carley looked
in vain for flowers and birds. The only living things she saw were
rainbow trout that Glenn pointed out to her in the beautiful clear
pools. The way the great gray bowlders trooped down to the brook as if
they were cattle going to drink; the dark caverns under the shelving
cliffs, where the water murmured with such hollow mockery; the low
spear-pointed gray plants, resembling century plants, and which Glenn
called mescal cactus, each with its single straight dead stalk standing
on high with fluted head; the narrow gorges, perpendicularly walled in
red, where the constricted brook plunged in amber and white cascades
over fall after fall, tumbling, rushing, singing its water melody--these
all held singular appeal for Carley as aspects of the wild land,
fascinating for the moment, symbolic of the lonely red man and his
forbears, and by their raw contrast making more necessary and desirable
and elevating the comforts and conventions of civilization. The cave man
theory interested Carley only as mythology.
Lonelier, wilder, grander grew Glenn's canyon. Carley was finally forced
to shift her attention from the intimate objects of the canyon floor
to the aloof and unattainable heights. Singular to feel the difference!
That which she could see close at hand, touch if she willed, seemed to,
become part of her knowledge, could be observed and so possessed and
passed by. But the gold-red ramparts against the sky, the crannied
cliffs, the crags of the eagles, the lofty, distant blank walls, where
the winds of the gods had written their wars--these haunted because
they could never be possessed. Carley had often gazed at the Alps as at
celebrated pictures. She admired, she appreciated--then she forgot.
But the canyon heights did not affect her that way. They vaguely
dissatisfied, and as she could not be sure of what they dissatisfied,
she had to conclude that it was in herself. To see, to watch, to dream,
to seek, to strive, to endure, to find! Was that what they meant? They
might make her thoughtful of the vast earth, and its endless age, and
its staggering mystery. But what more!