heer red
sandstone.

And besides the prehistoric in the Forests--what will you find? The
plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the
ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are
accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking;
and here is the realm of pure light.

Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
gives a bump. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other;
and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
Canyon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
patience! The road into Sundance Canyon takes you to the top of the
world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.

Long ago, men proved their superiority to other men by butchering each
other in hordes and droves and shambles; Alva must have had a good
100,000 corpses to his credit in the Netherlands. To-day, men make good
by conquering the elements. For four hours, this little Colorado road
has been cork-screwing up the face of a mountain pretty nearly sheer as
a wall; and for every twist and turn and tunnel, some engineer fellow on
the job has performed mathematical acrobatics; and some capitalist
behind the engineer--the man behind the modern gun of conquest--has paid
the cost. In this case, it was David Moffat paid for our dance in the
clouds--a mining man, who poked his brave little road over the mountains
across the desert