They walked on.  Quite suddenly the lane opened out between two rounded bluffs, and Shefford looked down upon a grander and more awe-inspiring scene than ever he had viewed in his dreams.

What appeared to be a green mountainside sloped endlessly down to a plain, and that rolled and billowed away to a boundless region of strangely carved rock.  The greatness of the scene could not be grasped in a glance.  The slope was long; the plain not as level as it seemed to be on first sight; here and there round, red rocks, isolated and strange, like lonely castles, rose out of the green.  Beyond the green all the earth seemed naked, showing smooth, glistening bones.  It was a formidable wall of rock that flung itself up in the distance, carved into a thousand canyon and walls and domes and peaks, and there was not a straight nor a broken nor a jagged line in all that wildness.  The color low down was red, dark blue, and purple in the clefts, yellow upon the heights, and in the distance rainbow-hued.  A land of curves and color!

Shefford uttered an exclamation.

“That’s Utah,” said Mary.  “I come often to sit here.  You see that winding blue line.  There. . . .  That’s San Juan Canyon.  And the other dark line, that’s Escalante Canyon.  They wind down into this great purple chasm—­’way over here to the left—­and that’s the Grand Canyon.  They say not even the Indians have been in there.”

Shefford had nothing to say.  The moment was one of subtle and vital assimilation.  Such places as this to be unknown to men!  What strength, what wonder, what help, what glory, just to sit there an hour, slowly and appallingly to realize!  Something came to Shefford from the distance, out of the purple canyon and from those dim, wind-worn peaks.  He resolved to come here to this promontory again and again, alone and in humble spirit, and learn to know why he had been silenced, why peace pervaded his soul.

It was with this emotion upon him that he turned to find his companion watching him.  Then for the first time he saw her face fully, and was thrilled that chance had reserved the privilege for this moment.  It was a girl’s face he saw, flower-like, lovely and pure as a Madonna’s, and strangely, tragically sad.  The eyes were large, dark gray, the color of the sage.  They were as clear as the air which made distant things close, and yet they seemed full of shadows, like a ruffled pool under midnight stars.  They disturbed him.  Her mouth had the sweet curves and redness of youth, but it showed bitterness, pain, and repression.

“Where are the sago-lilies?” he asked, suddenly.

“Farther down.  It’s too cold up here for them.  Come,” she said.

He followed her down a winding trail—­down and down till the green plain rose to blot out the scrawled wall of rock, down into a verdant canyon where a brook made swift music over stones, where the air was sultry and hot, laden with the fragrant breath of flower and leaf.  This was a canyon of summer, and it bloomed.