CHAPTER XI
Man changes. Toward the end of summer, Charles-Norton found himself insensibly altering the glorious routine of his altitudinous existence.
One day he was tempted by the great plain that lay golden in the West. Idly, he let himself float down the mountain sides, in long descending diagonals, and suddenly found himself above a farm in the plain. In the backyard, children were playing; a man was sharpening a plowshare at a wheel, and out of the kitchen-shed there came a clatter of dishes and the voice of a woman in song. Seized by a sudden perverse humor, Charles-Norton swooped into the chicken-yard and snatched a hen which, feeling herself rising in his hand, straightway shut her eyes and died of imagination. A scream rose from the earth, and looking down, Charles-Norton saw the three little children, legs apart, hands behind them, gazing up with white eyes; the man, back to the wheel, had his mouth open, as if inviting his vanishing fowl to drop back into it; and out of the kitchen door a wide woman suddenly popped, her lips working in malediction. His amusement a bit dampened by this consternation and by the unforeseen conduct of the hen, Charles-Norton went winging back, the dead fowl dangling at the end of his arm, to his retreat, and that night, when the pangs of his conscience had somewhat moderated, enjoyed the best dinner he had had for many days.
This incident reawakened in Charles-Norton a certain interest in human-kind. He began to visit the Valley more often.
The Valley was some hundred miles south of his meadow. It was a great cleft that split the mountain range from crest to center. Its walls were perpendicular and glacier-polished, and sculptured at the top into smooth domes and fretted spires. Down these sheer walls, here and there, coming to them without suspicion, whole rivers fell—some in rockets of diamonds, others chastely, in thin flight, like shifting and impalpable veils, others in great lustrous columns that struck the rocky bottom with thunderous impact and rebounded high in clouds of pulverized silver.
The Valley seemed full of people. They came in from the West, in stages. They lived in a large structure, at the bottom, which Charles-Norton surmised to be a hotel, and hundreds camped along the banks of the river, which wound light-green through the dark-green meadows. They wandered about incessantly, like ants; most of the time, at the bottom, but a good deal of the time also along the vertical sides, toiling pantingly up narrow trails, laid like the coils of a riata, till they reached points of vantage—domes, pinnacles, heads of falls—whereupon they immediately sat down and devoured sandwiches.
When Charles-Norton had first discovered the Valley, he had fled from it at the sight of human beings. But now, often, a secret impulse urged him to it. He spent days there, crouching upon the top curve of a great half-dome from which he could look down and watch the little beings at their lives—walking about, cooking their meals, eating them, or following the arduous windings of the trails with sweating noses. At night their fires twinkled red; and once, when Charles-Norton, wrapped in the secrecy of the dark, had slowly floated the whole length of the Valley above them, there had come to him, softened and blended by distance, the harmony of their voices in song.