By Way
Of Contrast He Rode A Small Arab Mare, Of Exquisite Beauty,
Skittish, High Spirited, Gentle, But Altogether Too
Light for
him, and he fretted her incessantly to make her display herself.
Heavily loaded as all our horses were,
"Jim" started over the
half-mile of level grass at a hard gallop, and then throwing his
mare on her haunches, pulled up alongside of me, and with a grace
of manner which soon made me forget his appearance, entered into
a conversation which lasted for more than three hours, in spite
of the manifold checks of fording streams, single file, abrupt
ascents and descents, and other incidents of mountain travel.
The ride was one series of glories and surprises, of "park" and
glade, of lake and stream, of mountains on mountains, culminating
in the rent pinnacles of Long's Peak, which looked yet grander
and ghastlier as we crossed an attendant mountain 11,000 feet
high. The slanting sun added fresh beauty every hour. There
were dark pines against a lemon sky, grey peaks reddening and
etherealizing, gorges of deep and infinite blue, floods of golden
glory pouring through canyons of enormous depth, an atmosphere of
absolute purity, an occasional foreground of cottonwood and aspen
flaunting in red and gold to intensify the blue gloom of the
pines, the trickle and murmur of streams fringed with icicles,
the strange sough of gusts moving among the pine tops - sights and
sounds not of the lower earth, but of the solitary,
beast-haunted, frozen upper altitudes.
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