As his hot blood cooled he lost faith in even this sacrifice. Could anything change the leopard West into the tameness and serenity of the ox? “No,” he decided, “nothing but death will do that. This generation, these fierce and bloody hearts, must die; only in that way can the tradition of violence be overcome and a new State reared.”
At the foot of the toilsome, upward-winding trail he dismounted, and led his weary horse. Over his head, and about half-way to the first hilltop, lay a roof of fleecy vapor, faint purple in color and seamless in texture. Through this he must pass, and it symbolized to him the line of demarkation between the plain and the mountain, between order and violence.
Again he rose above it, to find it a fantastic sea lit by the sun, and glowing with pink and gold and violet. Celestial in its ethereal beauty, it threw into still more appalling shadow the smoking altar of passion toward which he spurred. From moment to moment the surface rose and shifted in swift, tumultuous, yet soundless waves, breaking round pine-clad promontories in shimmering breakers, faint, and far, and serene.
Down through a deep canon to the south a prodigious river of mist was rushing, a silent cataract of ashy vapor plunging to a soundless beach. Above and beyond it the high peaks shone in radiance so pure that the heart of the lover ached with the pain of its evanescent beauty. It was as if he were looking across a foaming flood upon the stupendous and shining park of some imperial potentate whose ornate and splendid country home lay just beyond. Rocky spires rose like cathedral towers, and fortresses abutted upon the stream. And yet in the midst of that glorified plain the smoke of the burning rose.
Slowly he led his horse along the mountain-side, grasping with eager desire at every changing aspect of this marvellous scene. It was infinitely more gorgeous, more compelling, than his moonlight experience the night before, for here reality, definite and powerful, was interfused with mystery. These foot-hills, hitherto pleasantly precipitous, had suddenly become grandiose. All was made over upon a mightier scale, each rock and tree being distorted by the passing translucent clouds into a kind of monstrous yet epic proportion.
Ghostly white ledges broke from the darker mist like fields of distant crusted snow. Castellated crags loomed from the mystic river like fortified islands. Cattle, silent, enormously aggrandized, emerged like fabled beasts of the eld, and stared upon him, their jaws dripping with dew. Bulls roared from the obscure deeps. Dead trees, with stark and sinister arms, menaced warningly. All was as unreal as the world of pain’s delirium, and yet was as beautiful as the poet’s vision; and the ranger, feeling that he was looking upon one of Nature’s rarest displays, removed his hat in worship of it, thrilling with pride and satisfaction over the thought that this was his domain, his to guard and preserve.
The crowning glow of mystery and grace came as he led his horse out upon a projecting point of rocky ledge to rest. Here the cliff descended abruptly to an enormous depth, and upon the vaporous rolling flood beneath him a dome of darker shadow rested. At the summit of this shadow an aureole of rainbow light, a complete and glorious circle rested, in the midst of which his own image was flung, grotesque and gigantic.
“The Shadows of the Brocken!” he exclaimed, in ecstasy, all his bitterness, his care, forgotten. “Now I understand Goethe’s lines.” In all his life in the hills he had never before witnessed such a combination of peak and sun and cloud and shadow.
His love for the range came back upon him with such power that tears misted his eyes and his throat ached. “Where else will I find such scenes as this?” he asked himself. “Where in all the lowlands could such splendors shine? How can I leave this high world in which these wonders come and go? I will not! Here will I bring my bride and build my home. This is my world.”
But the mist grew gray, the aureole of fire faded, the sun went down behind the hills, and the chill of evening deepened on the trail, and as he reapproached the scene of man’s inhumanity to man the thought of camping there beside those charred limbs called for heroic resolution. He was hungry, too, and as the air pinched, he shivered.