No doubt the scenery had the more power over him because, by gazing at it day after day while his heart was full of Clara, he got into a way of animating it with her.  Far away as she was, and divided from him perhaps forever, she haunted the canon, transformed it and gave it grace.  He could see her face everywhere; he could see it even without shutting his eyes; it made the arrogant and malignant cliffs seraphic.  By the way, the vividness of his memory with regard to that fair, sweet, girlish countenance was wonderful, only that such a memory, the memory of the heart, is common.  There was not one of her expressions which was not his property.  Each and all, he could call them-up at will, making them pass before him in heavenly procession, surrounding himself with angels.  It was the power of the ring which is given to the slaves of love.

He had some vagaries (the vagaries of those who are subjugated by a strong and permanent emotion) which approached insanity.  For instance, he selected a gigantic column of sandstone as bearing some resemblance to Clara, and so identified it with her that presently he could see her face crowning it, though concealed by the similitude of a rocky veil.  This image took such possession of him that he watched it with fascination, and when a monstrous cliff slid between it and him he felt as if here were a new parting; as if he were once more bidding her a speechless, hopeless farewell.

During the greater part of this voyage he was a very uninteresting companion.  He sat quiet and silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips; he was whispering a name.  Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered him an eccentric.

“Naterally not quite himself,” judged the skipper.  “Some folks is born knocked on the head.”

“May be officers is always that a way,” was one of Sweeny’s suggestions.  “It must be mighty dull bein’ an officer.”

We must not forget the Great Canon.  The voyagers were amid magnitudes and sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and principalities of supernature.  They were borne through an architecture of aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and stonehenges.

For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides curved into extravagances of dizzy horror.  It seemed as if it might be a pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied Heaven.  On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep wrinkled the forehead of the precipice.  Armies might have been buried in their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits.  They ran back for many miles; they had once been the