The other picture was a silhouette of the city’s flank, mysterious as a line of unexplored cliffs, under a sky crimson—­barred from the zenith to the ground, where it lay, pale emerald behind the uneven ramparts.  As our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the rails glowed dull red, I caught the deep surge of it, and seven miles across the purple levels saw the low, restless aurora of its lights.  It is rather an awesome thing to listen to a vanguard of civilisation talking to itself in the night in the same tone as a thousand-year-old city.

All the country hereabouts is riddled with railways for business and pleasure undreamed of fifteen years ago, and it was a long time before we reached the clear prairie of air and space and open land.  The air is different from any air that ever blew; the space is ampler than most spaces, because it runs back to the unhampered Pole, and the open land keeps the secret of its magic as closely as the sea or the desert.

People here do not stumble against each other around corners, but see largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to avoid, and they shape their path accordingly across the waves, and troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans of the land.

When mere space and the stoop of the high sky begin to overwhelm, earth provides little ponds and lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where people can step down out of the floods of air, and delight themselves with small and known distances.  Most of the women I saw about the houses were down in the hollows, and most of the men were on the crests and the flats.  Once, while we halted a woman drove straight down at us from the sky-line, along a golden path between black ploughed lands.  When the horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she nodded mysteriously, and showed us a very small baby in the hollow of her arm.  Doubtless she was some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty and establish a country.  The Prairie makes everything wonderful.

They were threshing the wheat on both sides or the track as far as the eye could see.  The smoke of the machines went up in orderly perspective alongside the mounds of chaff—­thus:  a machine, a house, a mound of chaff, a stretch of wheat in stocks—­and then repeat the pattern over the next few degrees of longitude.  We ran through strings of nearly touching little towns, where I remembered an occasional shack; and through big towns once represented by a name-board, a siding, and two troopers of the North-West Police.  In those days men proved that Wheat would not grow north of some fool’s line, or other, or, if it did, that no one would grow it.  And now the Wheat was marching with us as far as the eye could reach; the railways were out, two, three hundred miles north, peopling a new wheat country; and north of that again the Grand Trunk was laying down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles across the Continent, with branches perhaps to Dawson City, certainly to Hudson Bay.