Again and again she visited this lookout and came to love its isolation, its command of wondrous prospects, its power of suggestion to her thoughts.  She became a creative being, in harmony with the live things around her.  The great life-dispensing sun poured its rays down upon her, as if to ripen her; and the earth seemed warm, motherly, immense with its all-embracing arms.  She no longer plucked the bluebells to press to her face, but leaned to them.  Every blade of gramma grass, with its shining bronze-tufted seed head, had significance for her.  The scents of the desert began to have meaning for her.  She sensed within her the working of a great leveling process through which supreme happiness would come.

June!  The rich, thick, amber light, like a transparent reflection from some intense golden medium, seemed to float in the warm air.  The sky became an azure blue.  In the still noontides, when the bees hummed drowsily and the flies buzzed, vast creamy-white columnar clouds rolled up from the horizon, like colossal ships with bulging sails.  And summer with its rush of growing things was at hand.

Carley rode afar, seeking in strange places the secret that eluded her.  Only a few days now until she would ride down to Oak Creek Canyon!  There was a low, singing melody of wind in the cedars.  The earth became too beautiful in her magnified sight.  A great truth was dawning upon her—­that the sacrifice of what she had held as necessary to the enjoyment of life—­ that the strain of conflict, the labor of hands, the forcing of weary body, the enduring of pain, the contact with the earth—­had served somehow to rejuvenate her blood, quicken her pulse, intensify her sensorial faculties, thrill her very soul, lead her into the realm of enchantment.

One afternoon a dull, lead-black-colored cinder knoll tempted her to explore its bare heights.  She rode up until her mustang sank to his knees and could climb no farther.  From there she essayed the ascent on foot.  It took labor.  But at last she gained the summit, burning, sweating, panting.

The cinder hill was an extinct crater of a volcano.  In the center of it lay a deep bowl, wondrously symmetrical, and of a dark lusterless hue.  Not a blade of grass was there, nor a plant.  Carley conceived a desire to go to the bottom of this pit.  She tried the cinders of the edge of the slope.  They had the same consistency as those of the ascent she had overcome.  But here there was a steeper incline.  A tingling rush of daring seemed to drive her over the rounded rim, and, once started down, it was as if she wore seven-league boots.  Fear left her.  Only an exhilarating emotion consumed her.  If there were danger, it mattered not.  She strode down with giant steps, she plunged, she started avalanches to ride them until they stopped, she leaped, and lastly she fell, to roll over the soft cinders to the pit.

There she lay.  It seemed a comfortable resting place.  The pit was scarcely six feet across.  She gazed upward and was astounded.  How steep was the rounded slope on all sides!  There were no sides; it was a circle.  She looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky.  Such depth of blue, such exquisite rare color!  Carley imagined she could gaze through it to the infinite beyond.