’Pache and I topped the divide. Did anybody say we were tired? Did any one believe that for a minute? That was a mistake. Why, when you throw off this chrysalis of pain and grief, when you drop your poor, sad mockery of a body, and pull up over the Range, you’re not going to be tired, are you? Are they tired on Pisgah? Are wings going to be tired like legs and arms and brains? No. Because—well, ’Pache knew that much.
A soft breeze from the south reached us upon the crest, and at its touch there hummed through ’Pache’s head the words of Goethe’s song in “Wilhelm Meister,”
“Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht;”
and the refrain,
“Kennst du das Land?”
And, verily, the Italy for which Mignon sighed might have been this that lay before us, stretching on and on in long lifts and falls of hills and valleys; in architecture of the ribs of eternity; in color the sum of Nature’s grand and simple touch. You can’t mix that! You can’t paint in royal purple, argent and aurum run together in one liquid, unburning fire! Take it up on a knife-blade, and perhaps it wouldn’t drop off. It wouldn’t run. But spread on by the brush of the Eternal hand, mellowed in the middle distance, softened in the background by the rays of the evening sun—there was color, above art, above description, above talk, above thought almost, fit to make ’Pache and me despair.
Off in the other direction, to the northwest, stretched the black foothills, and beyond them the brown and level plains, waterless, endless. That way—home lay that way, once. But if ’Pache and I should gallop night and day, we wouldn’t be as far as we see, and we wouldn’t have reached the nearest water-hole.
Tired? Why, we were on the crest of the divide, on the uplift of the earth, above the earth and its ailments. I could feel ’Pache’s wings under the saddle-flaps!
And ’Pache lifted up his head, whereon the mane was lightly blowing, and pitched his ears forward and neighed loud and cheerily. And some Valkyr steed behind a flat rock heard him and laughed at him, and so did another, and so did many others; and spirits came out and jeered at ’Pache, and small demons afar off mocked at him, and trumpet-calls for the assembly of the spirits of the mountains echoed and called back to us, fainter and fainter, passing on to the regions of the inner range.