Despite its fringe of green it was
hoary with age. Every looming gray-faced wall, massive and sublime, seemed
a monument of its mastery over time. Every deep-cut canyon, showing the
skeleton ribs, the caverns and caves, its avalanche-carved slides, its
long, fan-shaped, spreading taluses, carried conviction to the spectator
that it was but a frail bit of rock, that its life was little and brief,
that upon it had been laid the merciless curse of nature. Change! Change
must unknit the very knots of the center of the earth. So its strength lay
in the sublimity of its defiance. It meant to endure to the last rolling
grain of sand. It was a dead mountain of rock, without spirit, yet it
taught a grand lesson to the seeing eye.
Life was only a part, perhaps an infinitely small part of nature's plan.
Death and decay were just as important to her inscrutable design. The
universe had not been created for life, ease, pleasure, and happiness of a
man creature developed from lower organisms. If nature's secret was the
developing of a spirit through all time, Carley divined that she had it
within her. So the present meant little.
"I have no right to be unhappy," concluded Carley. "I had no right to Glenn
Kilbourne.
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