l until, above the last
echoing waterfall, she stepped out into the world beyond.

The great canyon spread out again, once she had passed the waterworn
Gorge, and peak after peak rose up to right and left where yawning side
canyons led in. But all were set on edge and reared up to dizzying
heights; and along their scarred flanks there lay huge slides of shaley
rock, ready to slip at the touch of a hand. Vivid stripes of red and
green, alternating with layers of blue and white, painted the sides of
the striated ridges; and odd seams here and there showed dull yellows
and chocolate browns like the edge of a crumbled layer-cake. Up the
canyon the walls shut in again, and then they opened out, and so on for
nine miles until Old Panamint was reached and the open valley sloped up
to the summit.

Many a time in the old days when they had lived in Panamint had
Wilhelmina scaled those far heights; the huge white wall of granite
dotted with ball-like pinons and junipers, which fenced them from Death
Valley beyond. It opened up like a gulf, once the summit was reached,
and below the jagged precipices stretched long ridges and fan-like
washes which lost themselves at last in the Sink. For a hundred miles to
the north and the south it lay, a writhing ribbon of white, pinching
down to narrow strips, then broadening out in gleaming marshes; and on
both sides the mountains rose up black and forbidding, a bulwark against
the sky. Wilhelmina had never entered it, she had been content to look
down; and then she crept back to beautiful sheltered Panamint where
father had his mine.

It was up on the ridge, where the white granite of the summit came into
contact with the burnt limestone and schist; and, of all the rich mines,
the Homestake was the best, until the cloudburst came along and spoiled
all of them. Wilhelmina still remembered how the great flood had passed
the town, moving boulders as if they were pebbles; but not until it
reached the place where she stood had it done irretrievable damage. The
roadbed was washed out, but the streambed remained, and the banks from
which to fill in more dirt; but when the flood struck the Gorge it
backed up into a lake, for the narrow defile was choked. Trees and rocks
and rumbling boulders had piled up against its entrance, holding the
waters back like a dam; and when they broke through they sluiced
everything before them, gouging the canyon down to the bedrock. Now
twelve years had passed by an