It was in the afternoon that I mounted the coach homeward bound, and bade good bye to a host of pleasant acquaintances. I felt rather guilty. I had stayed longer than I intended, and had had a much better time than I had anticipated. I felt somehow, therefore, as though I defrauded the Madame and Chum out of a pleasurable opportunity; and I resolved to note more carefully whatever I might see that was delightful.
The gap in the great red cliffs which lets the river and us out to the lowlands is only two or three hundred yards in width, and is filled with a dense growth of trees. The river trickles as a narrow, winding stream through a broad swath of pebbles that it has swept down, and which annually it overflows. The lofty cliffs stand on each side, erect and imposing. Theirs were the massive forms seen dimly in the darkness and enveloping us in inky shadows when we came up at midnight. Their irregularities break into new forms of picturesqueness as we roll past, enchanting our eyes. Three or four miles below town the thick growth of trees in the bottom and on the ledges thins out, while the valley grows wider, and ranches begin to appear. Pleasant houses, surrounded by trees, stand in the midst of wide fields of grain and low-lying meadows of natural hay. The cliffs still rise hundreds of feet high and are redder even than those above,—as brightly vermillioned as the crest of the treasure-mountain I have compared to a cardinal’s hat. Those on the eastern side (we are heading squarely northward) are sparsely wooded with spruces and cedars that get a foothold on the rocky shelves and lean outward craving the light; those on the left are almost bare, even of herbage.
It is said that Uncompahgre in the Ute tongue, means “red stream,” and, if so, it is easy to understand the application. The water is not red (though it might sometimes look so when roiled by freshets,) but the whole cañon is crimson and blood-stained. The color shines between bushes and trees, stands out in great upright masses, tinges the dust underfoot, and intensifies both the green of the heathery hills and the azure of mountain and sky.
At Dallas Station, where the Dallas river comes down from the west into the Uncompahgre, we stopped to get supper and wait for the stage from Telluride, Rico, Ames, and the other mining towns in the San Miguel range, whose outlet is this way. Those mountains were in plain view—Sneffles, Potosi, and all their peers,—glorified in the sunset; while away in the eastward could be seen the gashed and splintered peaks of that quartzite group (here called the Sawtooth, but reckoned on the maps as part of the Uncompahgre range) the outline of which I can only compare to the jagged confusion of the broken bottles set along the top of a stone wall.
It is dark when we leave Dallas and darker in the gloom of the mesa shadows and under the shrubbery that overhangs the road along the high river bank. Out of the blackness below came up the sound of the river’s fretting as from a nether world, for we could only now and then get a glimpse of the shaded water. When this had been passed, however, and we were going at a steady trot across the wide-reaching and starlit uplands, it was very delightful. The air was cool and soft and drowsy. The stars shone with that brilliance which long ago suggested to the savage mind that they were pin-holes in the canopy through which beamed the ineffable refulgence of an endless clay to be attained when the probation of this life was over. Every moment or two a meteor would leap out, flash with pale brilliance across the firmament, eclipsing the steady stars for an instant, and then disappear as though behind a veil. Sleepy cattle, resting in the dust, would rise with heavy lurchings to get out of our way and stupidly stare at us as we swung past. The “watch dog’s honest bark” came to our ears from ranches, whose position we knew by a dot of yellow light; ghostly forms would quickly resolve themselves into the white hoods of freight wagons, their poles piled with harness and their crews asleep underneath; faint rustlings in the sage-bush told of disturbed birds and rabbits; and so, peacefully and enjoyably, midnight brought us to our journey’s end.
XXX
MONTROSE AND DELTA.
My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,