The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of ColoradoBrady, Cyrus Townsend
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The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado
Brady, Cyrus Townsend
Colorado -- Fiction; Love stories; Western stories
The ground was rocky and broken, the timber line was close above her and
she judged that she must be several miles from the camp. The cañon was
very crooked, she could see only a few hundred yards of it in any
direction. She scanned her circumscribed limited horizon eagerly for the
smoke from the great fire that they always kept burning in the camp, but
not a sign of it was visible. She was evidently a thousand feet above
the river whence she had come. Her standing ground was a rocky ridge
which fell away more gently on the other side for perhaps two hundred
feet toward the same brook. She could see through vistas in the trees
the up-tossed peaks of the main range, bare, chaotic, snow covered,
lonely, majestic, terrible.
The awe of the everlasting hills is greater than that of the heaving
sea. Save in the infrequent periods of calm, the latter always moves,
the mountains are the same for all time. The ocean is quick, noisy,
living; the mountains are calm, still--dead.
The girl stood as it were on the roof of the world, a solitary human
being, so far as she knew, in the eye of God above her. Ah, but the Eyes
Divine look long and see far; things beyond the human ken are all
revealed. None of the party had ever come this far from the camp in this
direction she knew. And she was glad to be the first, as she fatuously
thought, to observe that majestic solitude.
Surveying the great range she wondered where the peak climbers might be.
Keen sighted though she was she could not discover them. The crest that
they were attempting lay in another direction hidden by a nearer spur.
She was in the very heart of the mountains; peaks and ridges rose all
about her, so much so that the general direction of the great range was
lost. She was at the center of a far flung concavity of crest and
range. She marked one towering point to the right of her that rose
massively grand above all the others. To-morrow she would climb to that
high point and from its lofty elevation look upon the heavens above and
the earth beneath, aye and the waters under the earth far below.
To-morrow!--it is generally known that we do not usually attempt the
high points in life's range at once, content are we with lower altitudes
to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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