Meanwhile the gears had been singing their shrill, incessant song as we mounted, swiftly. My seat was at the outside of the road. I turned my head in the direction of the plains. From where I sat the edge of the road was invisible. I had a sense of being wafted along through the air with nothing but a cushion between me and an abyss. I leaned out a little, and looked down at the wheel beneath me. Then I saw that several feet of pavement, lightly coated with snow, intervened between the tire, and the awful edge. Beyond the edge was several hundred feet of sparkling air, and beyond the air I saw the roofs of Golden. [Illustration: "Ain't Nature wonderful!"] One of these roofs annoyed me. I do not know the nature of the building it adorned. It may have been a church, or a school, or a town hall. I only know that the building had a tower, rising to an acute point from which a lightning rod protruded like a skewer. When I first caught sight of it I shuddered and turned my eyes upward toward the mountain. I did not like to gaze up at the heights which we had yet to climb, but I liked it better on the whole than looking down into the depths below. "What mountain do you call this?" I asked, trying to make diverting conversation. "Which one?" asked the Denver gentleman. "The one we are climbing." "This is just one of the foothills," he declared. "Oh," I said. "If this is a foothill," remarked my companion, "I suppose the Adirondacks are children's sand piles." "See how blue the plains are," said the Denver gentleman sweeping the landscape with his arm. "People compare them with the sea." I did not wish to see how blue the plains were, but out of courtesy I looked. Then I turned my eyes away, hastily. The spacious view did not strike me in the sense of beauty, but in the pit of the stomach. In looking away from the plains, I tried to do so without noticing the town below. I did not wish to contemplate that pointed tower, again. But a terrible curiosity drew my eyes down. Yes, there was Golden, looking like a toy village. And there was the tower, pointing up at me. I could not see the lightning rod now, but I knew that it was there. Again I looked up at the peaks. For a time we rode on in silence. I noticed that the snow on the slope beside us, and in the road, was becoming deeper now, but it did not seem to daunt our powerful machine. Up, up we went without slackening our pace. "Look!" exclaimed the Denver gentleman after a time. "You can see Denver now, just over the top of South Table Mountain." Again I was forced to turn my eyes in the direction of the plains. Yes, there was Denver, looking like some dream island of Maxfield Parrish's in the sea of plain. I tried to look away again at once, but the Denver man kept pointing and insisting that I see it all.