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Page 88
Again and again she visited this lookout and came to love its isolation,
its command of wondrous prospects, its power of suggestion to her thoughts.
She became a creative being, in harmony with the live things around her.
The great life-dispensing sun poured its rays down upon her, as if to ripen
her; and the earth seemed warm, motherly, immense with its all-embracing
arms. She no longer plucked the bluebells to press to her face, but leaned
to them. Every blade of gramma grass, with its shining bronze-tufted seed
head, had significance for her. The scents of the desert began to have
meaning for her. She sensed within her the working of a great leveling
process through which supreme happiness would come.
June! The rich, thick, amber light, like a transparent reflection from
some intense golden medium, seemed to float in the warm air. The sky became
an azure blue. In the still noontides, when the bees hummed drowsily and
the flies buzzed, vast creamy-white columnar clouds rolled up from the
horizon, like colossal ships with bulging sails. And summer with its rush
of growing things was at hand.
Carley rode afar, seeking in strange places the secret that eluded her.
Only a few days now until she would ride down to Oak Creek Canyon! There
was a low, singing melody of wind in the cedars. The earth became too
beautiful in her magnified sight. A great truth was dawning upon her--that
the sacrifice of what she had held as necessary to the enjoyment of life--
that the strain of conflict, the labor of hands, the forcing of weary body,
the enduring of pain, the contact with the earth--had served somehow to
rejuvenate her blood, quicken her pulse, intensify her sensorial faculties,
thrill her very soul, lead her into the realm of enchantment.
One afternoon a dull, lead-black-colored cinder knoll tempted her to
explore its bare heights. She rode up until her mustang sank to his knees
and could climb no farther. From there she essayed the ascent on foot. It
took labor. But at last she gained the summit, burning, sweating, panting.
The cinder hill was an extinct crater of a volcano. In the center of it lay
a deep bowl, wondrously symmetrical, and of a dark lusterless hue. Not a
blade of grass was there, nor a plant. Carley conceived a desire to go to
the bottom of this pit. She tried the cinders of the edge of the slope.
They had the same consistency as those of the ascent she had overcome. But
here there was a steeper incline. A tingling rush of daring seemed to drive
her over the rounded rim, and, once started down, it was as if she wore
seven-league boots. Fear left her. Only an exhilarating emotion consumed
her. If there were danger, it mattered not. She strode down with giant
steps, she plunged, she started avalanches to ride them until they stopped,
she leaped, and lastly she fell, to roll over the soft cinders to the pit.
There she lay. It seemed a comfortable resting place. The pit was scarcely
six feet across. She gazed upward and was astounded. How steep was the
rounded slope on all sides! There were no sides; it was a circle. She
looked up at a round lake of deep translucent sky. Such depth of blue, such
exquisite rare color! Carley imagined she could gaze through it to the
infinite beyond.
She closed her eyes and rested. Soon the laboring of heart and breath
calmed to normal, so that she could not hear them. Then she lay perfectly
motionless. With eyes shut she seemed still to look, and what she saw was
the sunlight through the blood and flesh of her eyelids. It was red, as
rare a hue as the blue of sky. So piercing did it grow that she had to
shade her eyes with her arm.
Again the strange, rapt glow suffused her body. Never in all her life had
she been so absolutely alone. She might as well have been in her grave. She
might have been dead to all earthy things and reveling in spirit in the
glory of the physical that had escaped her in life. And she abandoned
herself to this influence.
She loved these dry, dusty cinders; she loved the crater here hidden from
all save birds; she loved the desert, the earth--above all, the sun. She
was a product of the earth--a creation of the sun. She had been an
infinitesimal atom of inert something that had quickened to life under the
blazing magic of the sun. Soon her spirit would abandon her body and go on,
while her flesh and bone returned to dust. This frame of hers, that carried
the divine spark, belonged to the earth. She had only been ignorant,
mindless, feelingless, absorbed in the seeking of gain, blind to the truth.
She had to give. She had been created a woman; she belonged to nature; she
was nothing save a mother of the future. She had loved neither Glenn
Kilbourne nor life itself. False education, false standards, false
environment had developed her into a woman who imagined she must feed her
body on the milk and honey of indulgence.
She was abased now--woman as animal, though saved and uplifted by her power
of immortality. Transcendental was her female power to link life with the
future. The power of the plant seed, the power of the earth, the heat of
the sun, the inscrutable creation-spirit of nature, almost the divinity of
God--these were all hers because she was a woman. That was the great
secret, aloof so long. That was what had been wrong with life--the woman
blind to her meaning, her power, her mastery.
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