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.




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