The approach also to this splendid range is exceptionally fine. From the east, as the traveller leaves Winnipeg and enters on the prairie, till he reaches the foot of the mountains at Morley, nearly nine hundred miles away, the broad endless spread of the open country is seen. On many this apparently desolate, never-ending expanse of rolling grassland produces a sensation of weariness. But it is like the open sea in its size, and, like the ocean, has a charm that ordinary country does not possess. Its very immensity gives a mystery to it: sometimes the air is clear as crystal, and the white clouds on the horizon seem to be touching some far-distant fold of the landscape; at others the plain dances in the heat, and great mirage lakes can be seen covering the middle distances; again, thunderstorms pass along the sky, whose piled masses of cumuli clouds send down ribbons of fire, often causing fires that sweep for miles over the open grassland. At early dawn and sunset, however, are produced the great scenic effects of the prairie, and to look down the sky from the zenith to the setting sun, a great red ball just disappearing below the horizon, and count the colours that light up the islands, bays, promontories, and continents of that marvellous cloudland, makes one forget that one is in a railway train, or has anything to do with everyday life; it is like actually seeing for the first time some fairyland that one has read of in one's childhood. Afterwards, when the full moon comes out, the distances seem almost greater, and one can lie comfortably in bed and gaze at the landscape sliding swiftly by, comparing the ease and rapidity of modern travel, which does hundreds of miles in one night, with that of the pioneers who first traversed these endless plains a century or more ago. Near a station called Gleichen, the Rocky Mountains can be seen more than one hundred miles away, but it is not till one approaches them that it is recognised how abruptly they rise out of the prairie, like a long wall, with apparently not an opening; and, even when a few miles away, they seem an impenetrable barrier. The railway, however, follows the bank of the Bow river, which from its size must at least come down a moderate-sized valley, and just above where the Kananaskis, a side river, is crossed, a sudden bend of the line takes one through the gateway of the hills and the Bow valley is entered, which is then followed westward up to the Great Divide, or watershed, sixty miles away.