furnaces, and sometimes over the stunted grass whose needle-like stalks
seemed never to have known moisture, I let my eyes roam to such peaks as
were not cut off from view by the nearer hillsides, and wondered whether
the snow which capped them was whiter than any other or the blue of the
sky bluer, that the two together had the effect upon me of cameo work on
a huge and unapproachable scale.

Certainly the effect of these grand mountains, into which you leap
without any preparation from the streets and market-places of America's
oldest city, is such as is not easily described.

We struck water now and then,--narrow water--courses which my horse
followed in mid stream, and, more interesting yet, goatherds with their
flocks, Mexicans all, who seemed to understand no English, but were
picturesque enough to look at and a welcome break in the extreme
lonesomeness of the way.

I had been told that they would serve me as guides if I felt at all
doubtful of the trail, and in one or two instances they proved to be of
decided help. They could gesticulate, if they could not speak English,
and when I tried them with the one word Placide they would nod and point
out which of the many side canyons I was to follow. But they always
looked up as they did so, up, up, till I took to looking up, too, and
when, after miles multiplied indefinitely by the winding of the trail, I
came out upon a ledge from which a full view of the opposite range could
be had, and saw fronting me, from the side of one of its tremendous
peaks, the gap of a vast hole not two hundred feet from the snowline, I
knew that, inaccessible as it looked, I was gazing up at the opening of
Abner Fairbrother's new mine, the Placide.

The experience was a strange one. The two ranges approached so nearly
that it seemed as if a ball might be tossed from one to the other. But
the chasm between was stupendous. I grew dizzy as I looked downward
and saw the endless zigzags yet to be traversed step by step before the
bottom of the canyon could be reached, and then the equally interminable
zigzags up the acclivity beyond, all of which I must trace, still step
by step, before I could hope to arrive at the camp which, from where I
stood, looked to be almost within hail of my voice.

I have described the mine as a hole. That was all I saw at first--a
great black hole in the dark brown earth of the mountain-side, from
which ran down a still darker streak into the waste places far b