comprehension. I wanted to ponder on what had formed it--to reflect
upon its meaning as to age and force of nature. Yet it seemed that all
I could do was to see. White stars hung along the dark curved
line. The rim of the arch appeared to shine. The moon was up there
somewhere. The far side of the canyon was now a blank black wall. Over
its towering rim showed a pale glow. It brightened. The shades in the
canyon lightened, then a white disk of moon peeped over the dark line.
The bridge turned to silver.

It was then that I became aware of the presence of Nas ta Bega. Dark,
silent, statuesque, with inscrutable face uplifted, with all that was
spiritual of the Indian suggested by a somber and tranquil knowledge
of his place there, he represented to me that which a solitary figure
of human life represents in a great painting. Nonnezoshe needed life,
wild life, life of its millions of years--and here stood the dark and
silent Indian.

Long afterward I walked there alone, to and fro, under the bridge. The
moon had long since crossed the streak of star-fired blue above, and
the canyon was black in shadow. At times a current of wind, with all
the strangeness of that strange country in its moan, rushed through
the great stone arch. At other times there was silence such as I
imagined might have dwelt deep in the center of the earth. And again
an owl hooted, and the sound was nameless. It had a mocking echo. An
echo of night, silence, gloom, melancholy, death, age, eternity!

The Indian lay asleep with his dark face upturned, and the other
sleepers lay calm and white in the starlight. I seemed to see in them
the meaning of life and the past--the illimitable train of faces
that had shone under the stars. There was something nameless in that