第24章

Our trail of this summer led at a general high elevation, with comparatively little climbing and comparatively easy traveling for days at a time.Then suddenly we would find ourselves on the brink of a great box canon from three to seven thousand feet deep, several miles wide, and utterly precipitous.In the bottom of this canon would be good feed, fine groves of trees, and a river of some size in which swam fish.The trail to the canon-bed was always bad, and generally dangerous.In many instances we found it bordered with the bones of horses that had failed.The river had somehow to be forded.We would camp a day or so in the good feed and among the fine groves of trees, fish in the river, and then address ourselves with much reluctance to the ascent of the other bad and dangerous trail on the other side.After that, in the natural course of events, subject to variation, we could expect nice trails, the comfort of easy travel, pines, cedars, redwoods, and joy of life until another great cleft opened before us or another great mountain-pass barred our way.

This was the web and woof of our summer.But through it ran the patterns of fantastic delight such as the West alone can offer a man's utter disbelief in them.Some of these patterns stand out in memory with peculiar distinctness.

Below Farewell Gap is a wide canon with high walls of dark rock, and down those walls run many streams of water.They are white as snow with the dash of their descent, but so distant that the eye cannot distinguish their motion.In the half light of dawn, with the yellow of sunrise behind the mountains, they look like gauze streamers thrown out from the windows of morning to celebrate the solemn pageant of the passing of many hills.

Again, I know of a canon whose westerly wall is colored in the dull rich colors, the fantastic patterns of a Moorish tapestry.Umber, seal brown, red, terra-cotta, orange, Nile green, emerald, purple, cobalt blue, gray, lilac, and many other colors, all rich with the depth of satin, glow wonderful as the craftiest textures.Only here the fabric is five miles long and half a mile wide.

There is no use in telling of these things.They, and many others of their like, are marvels, and exist;but you cannot tell about them, for the simple reason that the average reader concludes at once you must be exaggerating, must be carried away by the swing of words.The cold sober truth is, you cannot exaggerate.They haven't made the words.Talk as extravagantly as you wish to one who will in the most childlike manner believe every syllable you utter.Then take him into the Big Country.He will probably say, "Why, you didn't tell me it was going to be anything like THIS!" We in the East have no standards of comparison either as regards size or as regards color--especially color.Some people once directed me to "The Gorge" on the New England coast.I couldn't find it.They led me to it, and rhapsodized over its magnificent terror.I could have ridden a horse into the ridiculous thing.As for color, no Easterner believes in it when such men as Lungren or Parrish transposit it faithfully, any more than a Westerner would believe in the autumn foliage of our own hardwoods, or an Englishman in the glories of our gaudiest sunsets.They are all true.

In the mountains, the high mountains above the seven or eight thousand foot level, grows an affair called the snow-plant.It is, when full grown, about two feet in height, and shaped like a loosely constructed pine-cone set up on end.Its entire substance is like wax, and the whole concern--stalk, broad curling leaves, and all--is a brilliant scarlet.

Sometime you will ride through the twilight of deep pine woods growing on the slope of the mountain, a twilight intensified, rendered more sacred to your mood by the external brilliancy of a glimpse of vivid blue sky above dazzling snow mountains far away.

Then, in this monotone of dark green frond and dull brown trunk and deep olive shadow, where, like the ordered library of one with quiet tastes, nothing breaks the harmony of unobtrusive tone, suddenly flames the vivid red of a snow-plant.You will never forget it.

Flowers in general seem to possess this concentrated brilliancy both of color and of perfume.You will ride into and out of strata of perfume as sharply defined as are the quartz strata on the ridges.They lie sluggish and cloying in the hollows, too heavy to rise on the wings of the air.

As for color, you will see all sorts of queer things.

The ordered flower-science of your childhood has gone mad.You recognize some of your old friends, but strangely distorted and changed,--even the dear old "butter 'n eggs" has turned pink! Patches of purple, of red, of blue, of yellow, of orange are laid in the hollows or on the slopes like brilliant blankets out to dry in the sun.The fine grasses are spangled with them, so that in the cup of the great fierce countries the meadows seem like beautiful green ornaments enameled with jewels.The Mariposa Lily, on the other hand, is a poppy-shaped flower varying from white to purple, and with each petal decorated by an "eye" exactly like those on the great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come to rest.They hover over the meadows poised.Amovement would startle them to flight; only the proper movement somehow never comes.