It took Carley a full hour of slow body-bending labor to climb to the
summit of that hill. High, steep, and rugged, it resisted ascension. But
at last she surmounted it and sat alone on the heights, with naked eyes,
and an unconscious prayer on her lips.
What was it that had happened? Could there be here a different answer
from that which always mocked her?
She had been a girl, not accountable for loss of mother, for choice
of home and education. She had belonged to a class. She had grown to
womanhood in it. She had loved, and in loving had escaped the evil of
her day, if not its taint. She had lived only for herself. Conscience
had awakened--but, alas! too late. She had overthrown the sordid,
self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had
fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she
had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy
of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and
motherhood. But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her soul
too late for happiness.
"Now it is answered," she declared aloud. "That is what has happened?...
And all that is past.... Is there anything left? If so what?"
She flung her query out to the winds of the desert. But the desert
seemed too gray, too vast, too remote, too aloof, too measureless. It
was not concerned with her little life. Then she turned to the mountain
kingdom.
It seemed overpoweringly near at hand. It loomed above her to pierce the
fleecy clouds. It was only a stupendous upheaval of earth-crust, grown
over at the base by leagues and leagues of pine forest, belted along the
middle by vast slanting zigzag slopes of aspen, rent and riven toward
the heights into canyon and gorge, bared above to cliffs and corners of
craggy rock, whitened at the sky-piercing peaks by snow. Its beauty and
sublimity were lost upon Carley now; she was concerned with its travail,
its age, its endurance, its strength. And she studied it with magnified
sight.
What incomprehensible subterranean force had swelled those immense
slopes and lifted the huge bulk aloft to the clouds? Cataclysm of
nature--the expanding or shrinking of the earth--vast volcanic action
under the surface! Whatever it had been, it had left its expression of
the travail of the universe. This mountain mass had been hot gas when
flung from the parent sun, and now it was solid granite. What had it
endured in the making? What indeed had been its dimensions before the
millions of years of its struggle?