CHAPTER XIII
THE SPIRES OF STONE
One afternoon they had pushed over back of Harney, up a very steep little trail in a very tiny cleft-like cañon, verdant and cool. All at once the trail had stood straight on end. The ponies scrambled up somehow, and they found themselves on a narrow open mesa splashed with green moss and matted with an aromatic covering of pine needles.
Beyond the easternmost edge of the plateau stood great spires of stone, a dozen in all, several hundred feet high, and of solid granite. They soared up grandly into the open blue, like so many cathedral spires, drawing about them that air of solitude and stillness which accompanies always the sublime in Nature. Even boundless space was amplified at the bidding of their solemn uplifted fingers. The girl reined in her horse.
"Oh!" she murmured in a hushed voice, "I feel impertinent—as though I were intruding."
A squirrel many hundreds of feet below could be heard faintly barking.
"There is something solemn about them," the boy agreed in the same tone, "but, after all, we are nothing to them. They are thinking their own thoughts, far above everything in the world."
She slipped from her horse.
"Let's sit here and watch them," she said. "I want to look at them, and feel them."