The chiefs bravely emerge from these echoless silences, dust-covered but
intrepid. They must now make the ascent of abrupt and massive bluffs.
The summit attained, they pause for rest and retrospect. The trail has
been obliterated. Every hoof-print in the sands has been erased. The
trackless, yellow expanse now assumes alluring miles of colour; the royal
purple of the shadows seems like tinted bands binding all the intervale
back yonder to the far distant council lodge. They are familiar with the
speech of the granite hills, from whose heights they now view the
prospect. In these rocks, so red that it would seem as though the molten
fires had not yet cooled, the Indian listens to the tongues of ten million
years. Earth’s heart fires had here and over there split the land and
left jagged monuments of stone and red ash bearing still the tint of flame
which had been cooled by the breath of countless winters. Still subject
to the inner and absorbing passion of his life, the Indian made an altar
in this weird sanctuary, and waited to worship.
But for the Indian the path is forever down—down into the shadowed vale,
down into the abysmal canon, balustraded with sombre, cold gray rocks
holding in the far recesses secret streams that make their way beneath the
mountain to the cloven rock on the sunlit slope. Thither then they rode,
solemn but steadfast. Once and again they turned upon their tired steeds
to look back upon the far-reaching line of cliffs which to them seemed to
float in the rising tide of a crimson sea. Forward and ever on until they
had reached the hush of the spacious prairies, rolling like the billows of
the ocean. Melancholy broods in the mind when these limitless and
unexplored stretches sweep before the eye bounded only by the horizon.
The spirit of a great awe stilled the souls of these men, every one,
because added to the monotone of the landscape they must heed the demands
for endurance, for it was again “a land where no water is.” Memory is at
times the birth-hour of prophecy, but here memory clothes the present with
pain and loss, and for them prophecy died yesterday and the despair of a
to-morrow writes its gloomy headlines upon every advance step of their
journey. But the Indian will face it. He always faces death as though it
were a plaything of the hour. The winds on these prairies always travel
on swift wing—they are never still—they are full of spectral voices. The
chiefs have left the council lodge, they have said farewell, their days of
triumph are behind them. Thoughts that burn the brain held the weary
pilgrims.
[Facing the Sunset]