“Bah!” disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy.
The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the cañon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness.
Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the cañon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows.
“O-o-o-oh!” sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. “Isn’t it fearfully, fearfully delightful? 257 It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!”
“That tickly feeling!” exclaimed Isobel. “I often ride up here to the cañon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it’s like ants crawling up and down my back.”
“O-o-o-oh!” again sighed Genevieve. “It––it so overpowers one!”
“It’s sure some cañon,” admitted her husband. “That French artist Doré ought to have seen it.”
“If only we had a copy of Dante’s Inferno to read here on the brink!” she whispered.
“It always reminds me of Coleridge’s poem,” murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:
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Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea. |