The rocks were the prototype of the temple, as was the forest of the Gothic cathedral, the date-palm of the Byzantine dome. But there worships here only the cañon-wren. He is the high priest who lifts up his voice in these rock temples—a sweet utterance delivered with the usual abandon of the wrens.
Above the cliffs, on the precipitous slopes, is the impress of still another agent. The ledge, smoothed as by a plane, and the scattered boulders amidst the dead timber and small aspens, give it an appearance of extreme desolation. Here, where now the Indian paint-brush glows in summer, the glacier crept snail-like down the mountain, from its cradle in some cirque above the forest. Timber-line is the frontier, the boundary between the verdant world and the land of snow and ice.
It was the glaciers which in the days of their strength chiseled the lake basins every one, and began the great cañons on which the streams have been at work ever since. At the same time they laid out the moraines, like so many parks, where the pines and the spruce have planted themselves. They did the rough work and prepared the great rock masses for the finer work of the rain and frost and wind—as the stone-cutter precedes the sculptor.
These lakes in many cases became the glacial meadows of today, which are like jewels set in the vast matrix of rock. Out of elemental changes, terrible in their immensity, came some of the most charming of all wild gardens,—as a rainbow follows a thunder-storm. These serene and altogether beautiful aspects of Nature were the outcome of tumult and passion—earthquakes, avalanches, lava-flows, glaciers, and now these idyllic meadows, beloved of bees and blossoms.
There is a certain cañon hereabout which is closed abruptly at one end by a precipice, over which descends a considerable stream. This fall is a thing of beauty, and so holds the eye that few think of scaling the cliffs to see what may be beyond. But, as it happens, there lies above, and sundered from the world beneath, one of the most delightful little valleys in the Rockies—a long, narrow defile, flanked by perpendicular cliffs of pink and red and buff sandstone.
All day the black-headed grosbeak sings in the aspens, dropping from one reverie into another. You may hear the voice of the green-tailed towhee, and the cañon-wren singing from his rock temple. The stream winds along the floor of the little valley, which is some eight thousand feet above the sea, now through quaking aspens and now under spruce, and its voice is as the murmuring of pines. This is the haunt of the shooting-star and the Alpine mertensia, delicate and exquisite blossoms, wooed by fugitive sunbeams and by the floating mist; which dwell in a subdued and tempered light amidst the Alpine silence, as in some floral cloister. Such are the rare and beautiful places of earth, which the mountain barriers defend and the clouds veil, as if they cherished here the last vestige of the fading youth and innocence of the old world.
There are days when the clouds shut down upon the little valley, veiling it from mortal eyes. The cliffs and buttes seem to float in air; the trail becomes a path to the clouds. You have only to go up on some ridge, and the pinnacles, looming in the fog, appear to be forlorn rocks in mid-ocean. It is the isolation again of the sea and of the desert.
At such times one receives impressions from the mountains which bring to mind the ocean, as if these retained memories—as they still bear traces—of the waters which gave them birth. This relation, once so intimate, is now sundered and only to be inferred. Where is the ancient sea which mothered the Rockies? The desert is its vast bed, now unoccupied. It vanished forever, leaving its impress upon the mountains. And now this sea-child is in its dotage, and it too dwindles and wanes century by century. But the fog still recalls the mother-sea, and out of the forgotten past conjures up little waves to dance upon a primordial beach.