Mighty cañons, rock-ribbed, gloomy and dark, have been gouged out of the very hearts of the cold, gray mountains that pierce the blue of heaven. But this sun-lit vale, too fair for the abode of man, lies just as nature left it, blue canopied, the cool green grass and murmuring Yellow Stone.
The Devil in a merry mood one day, coasted down the mountain at Cinnebar, scorching blood red a wide, smooth slide that would delight the daring heart of a tobogganist.
CHAPTER XX
YELLOWSTONE PARK
The artist may paint you a bit of sky, a little water, a few trees, and mayhap a bluebird or a merry brown thrush, but can he paint the gently moving restless air or the storm that sweeps down the mountainside, the murmur, the ripple, the roar of the river, the whir of the bluebird’s wing as it rises to flight, or the thrush’s song?
It is beyond the power of brush or pen to paint the wilderness, the beauty, the weirdness, the awful grandeur of this land of Malebolge, sulphurous pits and boiling lakes, a fit dwelling place for Minos, infernal judge; the elusive beauty of a playing geyser, the iridescent sparkle of the water as it leaps the rocky precipice and pours down the mountain’s great throat, or the diabolical scene of the famous Mud Geyser where,—
“Bellowing there groaned
A noise, as of a sea in tempest torn
By warring wings. The stormy blast of hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on,