Another day, the warmest of the spring so far, she rode a Navajo mustang she had recently bought from a passing trader; and at the farthest end of her section, in rough wooded and ridged ground she had not explored, she found a canyon with red walls and pine trees and gleaming streamlet and glades of grass and jumbles of rock.It was a miniature canyon, to be sure, only a quarter of a mile long, and as deep as the height of a lofty pine, and so narrow that it seemed only the width of a lane, but it had all the features of Oak Creek Canyon, and so sufficed for the exultant joy of possession.She explored it.The willow brakes and oak thickets harbored rabbits and birds.She saw the white flags of deer running away down the open.Up at the head where the canyon boxed she flushed a flock of wild turkeys.They ran like ostriches and flew like great brown chickens.In a cavern Carley found the den of a bear, and in another place the bleached bones of a steer.
She lingered here in the shaded depths with a feeling as if she were indeed lost to the world.These big brown and seamy-barked pines with their spreading gnarled arms and webs of green needles belonged to her, as also the tiny brook, the blue bells smiling out of the ferns, the single stalk of mescal on a rocky ledge.
Never had sun and earth, tree and rock, seemed a part of her being until then.She would become a sun-worshiper and a lover of the earth.That canyon had opened there to sky and light for millions of years; and doubtless it had harbored sheep herders, Indians, cliff dwellers, barbarians.She was a woman with white skin and a cultivated mind, but the affinity for them existed in her.She felt it, and that an understanding of it would be good for body and soul.
Another day she found a little grove of jack pines growing on a flat mesa-like bluff, the highest point on her land.The trees were small and close together, mingling their green needles overhead and their discarded brown ones on the ground.From here Carley could see afar to all points of the compass--the slow green descent to the south and the climb to the black-timbered distance; the ridged and canyoned country to the west, red vents choked with green and rimmed with gray; to the north the grand upflung mountain kingdom crowned with snow; and to the east the vastness of illimitable space, the openness and wildness, the chased and beaten mosaic of colored sands and rocks.
Again and again she visited this lookout and came to love its isolation, its command of wondrous prospects, its power of suggestion to her thoughts.
She became a creative being, in harmony with the live things around her.
The great life-dispensing sun poured its rays down upon her, as if to ripen her; and the earth seemed warm, motherly, immense with its all-embracing arms.She no longer plucked the bluebells to press to her face, but leaned to them.Every blade of gramma grass, with its shining bronze-tufted seed head, had significance for her.The scents of the desert began to have meaning for her.She sensed within her the working of a great leveling process through which supreme happiness would come.
June! The rich, thick, amber light, like a transparent reflection from some intense golden medium, seemed to float in the warm air.The sky became an azure blue.In the still noontides, when the bees hummed drowsily and the flies buzzed, vast creamy-white columnar clouds rolled up from the horizon, like colossal ships with bulging sails.And summer with its rush of growing things was at hand.
Carley rode afar, seeking in strange places the secret that eluded her.
Only a few days now until she would ride down to Oak Creek Canyon! There was a low, singing melody of wind in the cedars.The earth became too beautiful in her magnified sight.A great truth was dawning upon her--that the sacrifice of what she had held as necessary to the enjoyment of life--that the strain of conflict, the labor of hands, the forcing of weary body, the enduring of pain, the contact with the earth--had served somehow to rejuvenate her blood, quicken her pulse, intensify her sensorial faculties, thrill her very soul, lead her into the realm of enchantment.
One afternoon a dull, lead-black-colored cinder knoll tempted her to explore its bare heights.She rode up until her mustang sank to his knees and could climb no farther.From there she essayed the ascent on foot.It took labor.But at last she gained the summit, burning, sweating, panting.
The cinder hill was an extinct crater of a volcano.In the center of it lay a deep bowl, wondrously symmetrical, and of a dark lusterless hue.Not a blade of grass was there, nor a plant.Carley conceived a desire to go to the bottom of this pit.She tried the cinders of the edge of the slope.
