rhaps a dozen
times a year. There are days and days when the range is only white and
cold, days when it's black with storms, and days when it's dismal
gray. Then there comes an evening when the sun goes down red behind
the San Juan, and the snows on Sangre de Cristo run like blood. The
whole world, for a few minutes, seems to halt and stand still in awe
at that weird and mysterious spectacle--trainmen setting the brakes on
squealing ore trains on Marshall Pass, and miners coming out of their
tunnels above Creed all stop and look; Mexican sheep-herders in
Conejos pause to cross themselves; ranchmen by their lonely corrals up
and down the San Luis, and cowboys in the saddle on the open
range--all spellbound. It gives you a strange feeling--something that
goes back to the primitive instincts of mankind--something of
reverence, something of wonder, something of fear--the fear that the
first men had when they gazed on the phenomena they could not
understand, and began to make their myths and their religions.
Primitive superstition, primitive terror will never quite down in us,
no matter how wise and practical we become. There's always, in
beauty--in sheer beauty something terrifying, as well as something
sad. But--do I bore you with my dithyrambs?"

"No! No!" she exclaimed.

"The scene couldn't have been set better for that spectacle. There's a
green strip along the river, then bare sagebrush flats, and beyond the
flats are sand dunes where nothing grows but cactus and mesquite, and
here and there some tufts of grass as tough and dry as wire. In summer
the dunes are a parched and blistered inferno. In October they are
raw gray desolation. I don't want to know what they are like in
winter. The wind never ceases there. It builds the dunes into new
shapes every day, and the sagebrush is always bent and lopsided and
torn, and the colors are the gray and brown of the world's secret
tragedy. But when the red sunset is on the dunes there's nothing I
have ever seen so wild and passionate and beautiful.

"It was late in the autumn. I rode out of a deep arroya, and came,
without warning, into all that weird and solemn glory. There was a
cold gush of air from up the valley. Far in the north were purple
patches on the flats, and violet shadows in the foothills. But the
dunes were all vermilion, and I can't tell you what hue of red lay
spread out deep and vivid on the Sangre de Cristo peaks,--a living,
passionate, terrible blood-red.