At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride, a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs! Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.
For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be dark by the time we reach the hotel."
Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a sense of actual relief that we reëntered our apartment. Our eyes ached with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds, gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.
To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic, extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future.
"We'll go East after our visit to the old folks," I declared. "This is only the first half of our wedding journey; the other part shall include Washington, Boston, and New York."
Zulime looked somewhat incredulous (she didn't know me yet), but her eyes glowed with pleasure at the thought of the capital, of which she knew nothing, and of New York, which she knew only as a seaport. "I thought you were poor," she said.
"So I am," I replied, "but I intend to educate you in American geography."
The railway enters the Ouray amphitheater from the west and stops—for the very good reason that it can go no farther!—but from the railway station a stage road climbs the precipitous eastern wall and leads on to Red Mountain, as through an Alpine pass. Over this divide I now planned to drive to Silverton, and thence to Durango by way of Las Animas Cañon. Zulime, with an unquestioning faith in me—a faith which I now think of with wonder—agreed to this crazy plan. Her ignorance of the cold, the danger involved, made her girlishly eager to set forth. She was like a child in her reliance on my sagacity and skill.
We left Ouray, at eight of a bitter morning, in a rude sleigh with only a couple of cotton quilts to defend us from the cold, and when, after a long climb up a wall of stupendous cliffs with roaring streams shouting from their icy beds upon our right, we entered an aisle of frosty pines edging an enormous ledge, where frozen rills hung in motionless cascades, Zulime, enraptured by the radiant avenues which opened out at every turn of our icy upward trail, became blind to all danger. The flaming, golden light flinging violet shadows, vivid as stains of ink along the crusted slopes, dazzled her, caused her to forget the icy wind or, at any rate, to patiently endure it.
At Red Mountain, a mournful, half-buried, deserted mining town, we left our sleigh and stumbled into the dingy little railway station, so chilled, so cramped, that we could scarcely walk, and yet we did not regret our ride. However, we were glad of the warmth of the dirty little coach into which we climbed a few minutes later. It seemed delightfully safe to Zulime, and I was careful not to let her know that from this town the train descended of its own weight all the way to Silverton!