The train was climbing slowly to the summit of the Crow's Nest Pass. To the northward rose an extraordinary mountain, deeply tinted at its base with greens and purples, and capped with a dazzling crown of snow and ice. Around the glowing base, like children gathered at the knees of a monstrous mother, rose seven inferior monoliths, pillars of rock which in the morning light flamed like torches. All around were mountains, some flat-topped and hooded, some broken spires as of a vast cathedral ruined; beneath them wild gullies yawned, intricate defiles, deep canyons to whose sides the pines clung in an agony of effort; and so far below that it appeared but a thread of silver ran a silent river. Into these defiles the train moved timorously; now hanging for an instant on a wall of precipice, now suspended on a groaning trestle-bridge over depths of air, but ever moving on, like a living creature animate with the unconquerable energy of man. How good this mountain air, chill and clear and bright; how welcome this irregularity of form, passing through every grade from the exquisite to the magnificent, after the long, barren monotony of the plains! It was the transition from prose to poetry, from barbarian prose to lyric music. It was with a sinking heart that Arthur had remarked the long unfolding of the plains. They oppressed the mind, they lay like a weight upon the eyes, they breathed a savage and a hostile spirit. The scattered towns had an air of dereliction; the very houses seemed frozen to the soil, and around them was a silence, like the silence of death. But here once more Nature became a living thing, a hospitable and kindly mother. And to Arthur, who had never seen a mountain, this sudden revelation of grandeur and magnificence came with a shock of exquisite pain. His eyes filled with happy tears, his nerves tingled with delight, he drank long draughts of crystal air, he could have sobbed and shouted. For the first time he knew the bliss of being alive.