Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); West (U.S.) -- Social life and customs
Under favorable conditions Echo Canyon is a charming ravine. While our
evening campfire was lighting up the deep gorge, Ben, Fred and I
wandered down the banks of Echo Creek, the bright waters of which glide
along the base of overhanging sandstone cliffs, and we soon guessed why
the canyon had received its present name. To the focus of the vast
concaves that have been scooped from some of the cliffs the sound of our
voices came back with redoubled power, and to other points with softer
reverberations startling in effect. It is an unobservant traveler whose
attention has not often been arrested by weird echoes coming to his ears
from some mountain cliffs, but in the shadows of this canyon we
discussed the phenomena of echoes while interesting demonstrations were
being made. We endeavored to calculate the distance of the unseen cliffs
that sent back the sound, and then speculated upon the effect such
phenomena would produce upon the minds of an imaginative people like the
Greeks of the older period, who were ready at any time to pay homage to
any deity previously unrecognized. It was not strange that they should
conceive the fiction of the Nymph Echo, who because of her babbling was
made to pine away into a bodiless voice. Nights leisurely spent in these
canyons would lead the untutored mind to let loose its fancy, if it
possessed any, and people this mountain valley with beings more than
human.
As we looked westward down the canyon we noticed a little grove of
quaking aspen trees which had sent some of their slender branches above
the lines of the cliffs beyond, so that they were silhouetted against
the evening sky. Although the air seemed to be perfectly still in the
valley, the leaves of the aspen trees were vigorously shaking, as if
some invisible sprites were using them to wave signals across the gorge.
From the ravines now and then there came the dismal howl of a timber
wolf, and the cry, hurled back from the echoing rocks, was repeated
after a little delay, as if the wolf had been awaiting the returning
sound, like enough to his own to be the voice of his hungry brother. The
little stream continued to flow down the valley over its stony bed,
rushing under overhanging willows, singing its own peculiar music, in
which there was any melody that one's fancy might conceive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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