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Shudderingly she rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its swift, changeful, endless, contending strife for that was tragic. And she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split and canyoned, so grim and aloof for that was barren.
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.
Between a white-mantled mountain range on the left and the dark-striped lofty range on the right I could see far down into a gulf, a hazy void, a vast stark valley that seemed streaked and ridged and canyoned, an abyss into which veils of rain were dropping and over which broken clouds hung, pierced by red and gold rays. Death Valley! Far down and far away still, yet confounding at first sight!
The desert seemed never to change in the vast whole that encompassed him, yet near him it was always changing. From Red Lake he had seen a peaked, walled, and canyoned country, as rough as a stormy sea; but when he rode into that country the sharp and broken features held to the distance. He was glad to get out of the sand.
That afternoon I was following a stream which at last "canyoned up," that is sank to the bottom of a canyon-like ravine impossible for a horse. I started up a side valley, intending to cross from its head coulies to those of another valley which would lead in below the canyon.
The height upon which he stood was the last of the ridges, for the elevation that lay directly across was a noble range of foothills, timbered, canyoned, apparently insurmountable for horses. Gray cliffs stood out of the green, crags of yellow rock mounted like castles. But it was the blue floor of the valley that longest held Pan's enraptured gaze.
The great mountain of Haleakala rose up in a long line against the sky on the left, and the deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of the older, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three miles distant.
Below these lay broken ravines of fantastic rocks, cleft and canyoned by the river, with a tender unearthly light over all, the apparent warmth of a glowing clime, while I on the north side was in the shadow among the pure unsullied snow. "'With us the damp, the chill, the gloom; With them the sunset's rosy bloom. "The dimness of earth with me, the light of heaven with them.
Where Cardenas reached the great canyon the river came from the NORTH-EAST and turned to the SOUTH-SOUTH-WEST. There are but two places where the canyoned river in Arizona conforms to this course, one at Lee's Ferry, and the other the stretch from Diamond Creek to the Kanab Canyon.
We had to cross gravel patches and pits where avalanches had slid, and at last, gaining the bench we went through the pine grove, out to a manzanita thicket, to a rocky point where the ledges were toppling and dangerous. The stand here afforded a magnificent view. We were now down in the thick of this sloped and canyoned and timbered wildness; no longer above it, and aloof from it.
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