The tips of the peak
gleamed opal. There was no sunrise red, no fire. The light in the east was
a pale gold under a steely green-blue sky. All the abyss of the Canyon was
soft, gray, transparent, and the belt of gold broadened downward, making
shadows on the west slopes of the mesas and escarpments. Far down in the
shadows she discerned the river, yellow, turgid, palely gleaming. By
straining her ears Carley heard a low dull roar as of distant storm. She
stood fearfully at the extreme edge of a stupendous cliff, where it sheered
dark and forbidding, down and down, into what seemed red and boundless
depths of Hades. She saw gold spots of sunlight on the dark shadows,
proving that somewhere, impossible to discover, the sun was shining through
wind-worn holes in the sharp ridges. Every instant Carley grasped a
different effect. Her studied gaze absorbed an endless changing. And at
last she realized that sun and light and stars and moon and night and
shade, all working incessantly and mutably over shapes and lines and angles
and surfaces too numerous and too great for the sight of man to hold, made
an ever-changing spectacle of supreme beauty and colorful grandeur.
She talked very little while at the Canyon.
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