And on this Sunday, looking down, I thought of the monster bone I had found yesterday in the dry shale and sand under the cliff. When the Three Wise Men saw the star in the east, that bone was as I had found it. It was there when Christ was born. It was there, unmoved and untouched, before Rome was founded, before Troy died in the mists of the past, before history, as we know history, began. It was there a million years ago, ten million, fifty, a hundred. And, thinking of this, I felt myself growing smaller and smaller; my egoism died away, and I saw these mountains obliterated and under the blue of a vast ocean, and rising out of that ocean I saw other continents, peopled with other people, moved by other religions, beating to the pulse of other civilizations long dead. I heard the beat of waves below me, where grew the grass and the flowers of the valley. And the droning music of that valley seemed to change into the low whisperings of countless trillions of men and women and little children who had lived and died in those other civilizations of the lost ages; and that fancied whispering of dead worlds told me a great truth—that the Supreme Arbiter of things had watched over all those trillions just as he was now watching over me, that I was but a pitifully small grain of dust in the great scheme of things, that my egoism was criminal, sacrilegious, a curse set upon myself by myself. And the soft and droning whisper also told me the time would come when my own “civilization” would be obliterated, to be followed by a hundred, a thousand, or a million others, each in its turn to live and die.
And it was then, on that Sunday precious to me, that I asked myself an old, old question in a great, new way—“What is God?”
And looking down into the valley, and up into the sky, understanding came to me. God is there, and there, and there. He is the Infinite Power. He is Life. Life began infinities ago, and it will continue through other infinities. While we are squabbling among ourselves with our little religions and our little views, while we are preaching the damnation of beliefs that are not ours, while sects fight to convert sects that do not think as they think, while our narrow-gage minds travel in their narrow-gage paths,—that Infinite Power is watching and waiting, as it has watched and waited from the beginning, and as it will watch and wait until the end. And I stared down into the valley, green and glorious and filled with sunshine and peace, and that low-sung whisper seemed to say, “If this is not God what is God?” And then also, in a new way, came something in my brain which said to me, “And who are you?”
I climbed higher up the mountain. I felt my greatness gone. Kindly, something had told me how pitiful I was. I was not mighty. I was no more in the ultimate of things than a blade of grass. My egoism, on that glorious Sunday, began to crumble in my soul. And then, by chance if you will have it so, came the climax of that day.
I came to a sheer wall of rock that rose hundreds of feet above me. Along this ran a narrow ledge, and I followed it. The passage became craggy and difficult, and in climbing over a broken mass of rock, I slipped and fell. I had brought a light mountain-gun with me, and in trying to recover myself I swung it about with such force that the stock struck a sharp edge of rock and broke clean off. But I had saved myself from possible death, and was in a frame of mind to congratulate myself rather than curse my luck. Fifty feet farther on I came to a “pocket” in the cliff, where the ledge widened until, at this particular place, it was like a flat table twenty feet square. Here I sat down, with my back to the precipitous wall, and began to examine my broken rifle.
I laid it beside me, useless. Straight up at my back rose the sheer face of the mountain; in front of me, had I leaped from the ledge, my body would have hurtled through empty air for a thousand feet. In the valley I could see the creek, like a ribbon of shimmering silver; two or three miles away was a little lake; on another mountain I saw a bursting cascade of water leaping down the heights and losing itself in the velvety green of the lower timber. For many minutes, new and strange thoughts possessed me. I did not look through my hunting-glasses, for I was no longer seeking game. My blood was stirred, but not with the desire to kill.
And then, suddenly, there came a sound to my ears that seemed to stop the beating of my heart. I had not heard it until it was very near—approaching along the narrow ledge.
It was the click,—click,—click of claws rattling on rock!
I did not move. I hardly breathed. And out from the ledge I had followed came a monster bear!