that had tumbled from above also interested Carley, especially when the sun
happened to come out for a few moments and brought out their color. She
enjoyed walking on the fallen pines, with Glenn below, keeping pace with
her and holding her hand. Carley looked in vain for flowers and birds. The
only living things she saw were rainbow trout that Glenn pointed out to her
in the beautiful clear pools. The way the great gray bowlders trooped down
to the brook as if they were cattle going to drink; the dark caverns under
the shelving cliffs, where the water murmured with such hollow mockery; the
low spear-pointed gray plants, resembling century plants, and which Glenn
called mescal cactus, each with its single straight dead stalk standing on
high with fluted head; the narrow gorges, perpendicularly walled in red,
where the constricted brook plunged in amber and white cascades over fall
after fall, tumbling, rushing, singing its water melody--these all held
singular appeal for Carley as aspects of the wild land, fascinating for the
moment, symbolic of the lonely red man and his forbears, and by their raw
contrast making more necessary and desirable and elevating the comforts and
conventions of civilization. The cave man theory interested Carley only as
mythology.

Lonelier, wilder, grander grew Glenn's canyon. Carley was finally forced to
shift her attention from the intimate objects of the canyon floor to the
aloof and unattainable heights. Singular to feel the difference! That which
she could see close at hand, touch if she willed, seemed to, become part of
her knowledge, could be observed and so possessed and passed by. But the
gold-red ramparts against the sky, the crannied cliffs, the crags of the
eagles, the lofty, distant blank walls, where the winds of the gods had
written their wars--these haunted because they could never be possessed.
Carley had often gazed at the Alps as at celebrated pictures. She admired,
she appreciated--then she forgot. But the canyon heights did not affect her
that way. They vaguely dissatisfied, and as she could not be sure of what