ktrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn
incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the
crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense
of discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men
who had ever been there: that was the most gripping thing about it.

Aloof, stupendous, terriffic, staggering in the intensity of its wild
beauty, you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you
can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer within ten miles of
its far-flung thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing
rather well!

Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the mad flood, we swung
ourselves about a ledge, dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended to
the level of the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed
through a dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight, and came out
again into the beat of the desert sun, to look squarely into the face of
the giant.

A hawk wheeled and swooped and floated far up in the dazzling air.
Somehow that hawk seemed to make the lonely place doubly lonely. Did you
ever notice how a lone coyote on a snow-heaped prairie gives you a
heartache, whereas the empty waste would only have exhilarated you?
Always, it seemed, that veering hawk had hung there, and would hang so
always--outliving the rising of suns and the drifting of stars and the
visits of the moon.

A vague sense of grief came over me at the thought of all this eternal
restlessness, this turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much
greater to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, somehow,
into something big and new; than to be this Promethean sort of thing, a
giant waterfall in a waste.

I have known men who felt dwarfed in the presence of vast and awful
things. I never felt bigger than when I first looked upon the ocean. The
skyward lift of a mountain peak makes me feel very, very tall. And when
a thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with
jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know
all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander
the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant
who does nothing at all--not even a vaudeville stunt--and does it so
masterfully.

By and by they'll build a hotel in the flat at the edge of the lower
basin; plant prim flowers in very prim beds; and rob yo