But with all its natural look one is at loss to understand how it could ever be seriously accepted as a fact, save at the first blush. People dying for water and in delirium run toward it—at least the more than twice-told tales of travellers so report—but I never knew any healthy eye that did not grow suspicious of it after the first glance. It trembles and glows too much and soon reveals itself as something intangible, hardly of earth, little more than a shifting fantasy. You cannot see it clear-cut and well-defined, and the snap-shot of your camera does not catch it at all.
Beauty of mirage.
Yet its illusiveness adds to, rather than detracts from, its beauty. Rose-colored dreams are always delightful; and the mirage is only a dream. It has no more substantial fabric than the golden haze that lies in the canyons at sunset. It is only one of nature’s veilings which she puts on or off capriciously. But again its loveliness is not the less when its uncertain, fleeting character is revealed. It is one of the desert’s most charming features because of its strange light and its softly glowing opaline color. And there we have come back again to that beauty in landscape which lies not in the lines of mountain valley and plain, but in the almost formless masses of color and light.
Footnotes
[5] Century Dictionary.
CHAPTER VIII
CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD
Views of Nature.
Growth and decay.
Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent goddess just as our own inadequate vision happens to see her. If we have eyes only for her creative beauties we think her all goodness; if we see only her power of destruction we incline to think she is all evil. With what infinite care and patience, worthy only of a good goddess, does she build up the child, the animal, the bird, the tree, the flower! How wonderfully she fits each for its purpose, rounding it with strength, energy, and grace; and beautifying it with a prodigality of colors. For twenty years she works night and day to bring the child to perfection, for twenty days she toils upon the burnished wings of some insect buzzing in the sunlight, for twenty hours she paints the gold upon the petals of the dandelion. And then what? What of the next twenty? Does she leave her handiwork to take care of itself until an unseen dragon called Decay comes along to destroy it? Not at all. The good goddess has a hand that builds up. Yes; and she has another hand that takes down. The marvellous skill of the one has its complement, its counterpart, in the other. Block by block she takes apart the mosaic with just as much deftness as she put it together.
Nature’s plan.