There she lay. It seemed a comfortable resting place. The pit was
scarcely six feet across. She gazed upward and was astounded. How
steep was the rounded slope on all sides! There were no sides; it was
a circle. She looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky. Such
depth of blue, such exquisite rare color! Carley imagined she could gaze
through it to the infinite beyond.
She closed her eyes and rested. Soon the laboring of heart and breath
calmed to normal, so that she could not hear them. Then she lay
perfectly motionless. With eyes shut she seemed still to look, and what
she saw was the sunlight through the blood and flesh of her eyelids. It
was red, as rare a hue as the blue of sky. So piercing did it grow that
she had to shade her eyes with her arm.
Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life
had she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her
grave. She might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in
spirit in the glory of the physical that had escaped her in life. And
she abandoned herself to this influence.
She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden
from all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth--above all, the
sun. She was a product of the earth--a creation of the sun. She had
been an infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life
under the blazing magic of the sun. Soon her spirit would abandon her
body and go on, while her flesh and bone returned to dust. This frame of
hers, that carried the divine spark, belonged to the earth. She had only
been ignorant, mindless, feelingless, absorbed in the seeking of gain,
blind to the truth. She had to give. She had been created a woman; she
belonged to nature; she was nothing save a mother of the future. She had
loved neither Glenn Kilbourne nor life itself. False education, false
standards, false environment had developed her into a woman who imagined
she must feed her body on the milk and honey of indulgence.
She was abased now--woman as animal, though saved and uplifted by her
power of immortality. Transcendental was her female power to link life
with the future. The power of the plant seed, the power of the earth,
the heat of the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost
the divinity of God--these were all hers because she was a woman. That
was the great secret, aloof so long. That was what had been wrong with
life--the woman blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery.