The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1906-11-04

wanderer, leaves him homeless In all other
places forever after.
Imagine yourself, o you who do not
know the wonder OF the West, standing
upon the spur of some grim granite range.
that rises sharply above these plains 5000
feet. Back OF you and above you are the
mountains; before you and below lies the
world.
Here a storm cloud, fat and purple be-
meath. towering white in it's pinnacles,
and shot through with lightning, thrusts
out from the ranges 10 lose itself in the
sunny silence. There, a hundred and fifty
miles away, rises some group Of nameless
peaks through air so clear you see the
shadows on them.
For the rest, the plains, TO which peaks
and storms are but incidents, are at your
feet. Mile upon mile, league upon league,
they stretch away to the shifting. elusive
horizon, and mile upon mile beyond that,
hidden only by the curve OF the earth
itself.
Here and there. a tiny blur detected in the
midst of their color. rises the smoke of some
packed city, or of some loaded train follow
ing its threads Of steel across the emptiness.
Yet no sound Of men comes to your silence.
Wheel and whistle are lost in the mightiness
Of the space below you. Vast, sunlit, frail,
the peopled world is airy as a dream. So
dreamlike are it's colors, so fleeing, that
you find yourself holding your breath lest
it vanish quite away.
1t is a and Of color. In the North and
among the Sierras the coloring is little like
that of Switzerland-high, white SHOWS and
cold glaciers breaking into purple rocks
or blue black forests; these in turn losing
themselves again in the green sunlit grasses
Of the meadow lands and parks.
In the Rockies the white Of the SHOWS is
often absent, leaving gaunt peaks Of brown
or red gray rock against the sky. Lower
down comes the sharp black timber line,
below that the slopes OF dried grass or the
ranks of silver gray pine stumpe, and the
mountains are bound together by cations
and pinnacles, all Of scarlet and bun and
white and rich brown rock.
But the uttermost glory Of color the deserts
Of the est alone can show. The
fragile unearthiness of the prairie color il
but the ghost Of the splendor Of the deserts.
Crimson and dun and blue, rifted with the
golden sands Of some dried watercourse,
far and away stretch the desert floors, the
white skies over them and always the noun
tains. purple and lavender, beyond their
horizons.
Deeper become the colors; richer, more
luminous as the westward miles are trav-
ersed, until one catches up with the un-
set at last and stands in its midst upon
the verge OF the Grand Canon. There
in the late afternoon the walls Of the tre-
mendous chasm seem themselves to give
out light.
The loneliness and the mystery Of the
West, as well as its color, are in the desert.
The desert loneliness is not that OF the
p~rairies, hat seem free from the tread Of
human foot since the world began, but is
a loneliness forever burdened with a sense
of haunting, vanished races.
Vanished races nave been there; trail
Of them worn across the Painted Desert,
home OF them nesting in the cranneries
OF the cliffs. But trail and nome have moth
ing to do with the sense Of their presence
in the land. 1t is felt, not inferred.
The presence Of the lost peoples still
broods threateningly on the deserts-and
their threat is the old, old question OF the
destiny OF III all. For the desert will be
the same when the rusted rails shall mark
the passage Of our roads, as the silly, dang
ling ends Of ropes mark the ladders Of those
who have gone before.
Over all will dwell the desert silence,
then as now; not the silence OF the upper
peaks where the wind continually PUSHES:
nor the silence Of calm on the water. EN-
phasized by the tapping OF little ripples.
II is the silence OF interstellar space.
A land Of wide spaces, OF simple. strongly
marked features, OF color and Of mystery.
is the West. II Is clear aired and all the
more mysterious because 1t 10 so clear.
Il il haunted. and all the moro eerie because
it, ghosts are unnamed. IL In beautiful
with a beauty no other land has known.