is as if he says, "There, way beyond, over the ranges, is a place I
know, and it is far." The fact was that I looked at the Piute's dark,
inscrutable face before I looked out into the void.

My gaze then seemed impelled and held by things afar, a vast yellow
and purple corrugated world of distance, apparently now on a level
with my eyes. I was drawn by the beauty and grandeur of that scene;
and then I was transfixed, almost by fear, by the realization that
I dared to venture down into this wild and upflung fastness. I kept
looking afar, sweeping the three-quarter circle of horizon till my
judgment of distance was confounded and my sense of proportion dwarfed
one moment and magnified the next.

Wetherill was pointing and explaining, but I had not grasped all he
said.

"You can see two hundred miles into Utah," he went on. "That bright
rough surface, like a washboard, is wind-worn rock. Those little lines
of cleavage are canyons. There are a thousand canyons down there, and
only a few have we been in. That long purple ragged line is the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado. And there, that blue fork in the red, that's
where the San Juan comes in. And there's Escalante Canyon."

I had to adopt the Indian's method of studying unlimited spaces in the
desert--to look with slow contracted eyes from near to far.

The pack-train and the drivers had begun to zigzag down a long slope,
bare of rock, with scant strips of green, and here and there a cedar.
Half a mile down, the slope merged in what seemed a green level. But I
knew it was not level. This level was a rolling plain, growing darker