towards the Pacific.

[Illustration: From a lookout point in the Coconino Forest of Arizona]

You come through those upper tunnels still higher. Below, no longer lie
the plains, but seas of clouds; and it is to the everlasting credit of
the sense and taste of Denver people, that they have dotted the outer
margin of this rock wall with slab and log and shingle cottages, built
literally on the very backbone of the continent overlooking such a
stretch of cloud and mountain and plain as I do not know of elsewhere in
the whole world. In Sundance Canyon, South Dakota, summer people have
built in the bottom of the gorge. Here, they are dwellers in the sky.
Rugged pines cling to the cliff edge blasted and bare and wind torn; but
dauntlessly rooted in the everlasting rocks. Little mining hamlets
composed of matchbox houses cling to the face of the precipice like
cardboards stuck on a nail. Then, you have passed through the clouds,
and are above timber line; and a lake lies below you like a pool of pure
turquoise; and you twist round the flank of the great mountain, and
there is a pair of green lakes below you--emerald jewels pendant from
the neck of the old mountain god; and with a bump and a rattle of the
wheels, clear over the top of the Continental Divide you go--believe me,
a greater conquest than any Napoleon's march to Moscow, or Alva's
shambles of headless victims in the Netherlands.

You take lunch in a snow shed on the very crest of the Continental
Divide. I wish you could taste the air. It isn't air. It's champagne. It
isn't champagne, it's the very elixir of life. There can never be any
shadows here; for there is nothing to cast the shadow. Nightfall must
wrap the world here in a mantle of rest, in a vespers of worship and
quiet, in a crystal of dying chrysoprase above the green enameled lake
and the forests below, looking like moss, and the pearl clouds, a sea of
fire in the sunset, and the plain--there are no more plains--this is the
top of the world!

Yet it is not always a vesper quiet in the high places. When I came back
this way a week later, such a blizzard was raging as I have never seen
in Manitoba or Alberta. The high spear grass tossed before it like the
waves of a sea; and the blasted pines on the cliffs below--you knew why
their roots had taken such grip of the rocks like strong natures in
disaster. The storm might break them. It could not bend them, nor wrench
them from their roots. The telegraph wire