The harvest moon shed her yellow light over the distant plain, and gilded with a phosphorescent light the rocks and crags of the almost bottomless chasm below. The rocks took on fantastic shapes, while distant mountains rose in spectral form.
I sat throughout the night, watching the ever changing panorama, the most wondrous ever spread out to the gaze of man.
The moon and stars were bright above, while far down below storm clouds had formed where within their inky blackness the forked lightning played like so many fiery serpents.
There were thunderous crashes in the wild rocky pit below, where huge rocks were shivered by lightning bolts, while echo, echoing back the thunders of heaven’s artillery, would seem as though a legion of imprisoned Joshuas were reaching upward again for that sun which would stand still no more over the plains of Agalon.
The shades of night grew deeper and then the blackness was driven back from the east by a flush of grey, gradually changing to a deep scarlet tinged with yellow and the sun burst above a dashing sea of clouds. There were purple and crimson waves below rising and falling in mighty billows. A shipless and shoreless ocean whose raging bosom claims no living thing.
An hour more and this purple sea of clouds has drifted on forever from the sight of human eyes.
The summer sun beamed once more upon the vast panorama. Far down upon the green mesa lay Lake Moraine, glistening in the morning light like a molten mass of silver.
Smoke was seen to rise from Denver and Pueblo, both fully sixty miles away. Some smelters in Cripple Creek and Victor could be seen with the naked eye, while the streets of Colorado Springs were but sandy marks like a checkerboard upon the plain.
I descended the peak on foot amid the beauteous scenes of green mountain defiles, where dashing waters sing eternal symphonies amid ferns and flowers, and the song of birds gladden the heart in their sweet echoes from rock to rock.