Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow” appearing clear against the blue of high heaven. Now, as I have drawn nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration, and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their vast cañons. CHAPTER VIII FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC PHŒNIX, ARIZONA, January 3, 1893. Journeying by no pre-arranged plan, but directing my course according to the promptings of chance circumstances, I have wandered far from a direct westward line from Denver to the sea, but I have come by a way that has furnished in experience all that I could have hoped. The very first step from Denver carried me out of a due westward course. In the vague, ill-defined manner of a tenderfoot, I knew that Cripple Creek was a relatively new mining camp, and that it lay somewhere beyond Pike’s Peak, and I light-heartedly dreamed that, being a new camp, it was just the place for a new-comer; so, late in September, I set out from Denver with Cripple Creek in view. For seventy miles or more I went south, the earlier part of the walk leading me through the sandy tract which begins abruptly at the very edge of the fresh green lawns that mark the end of irrigation in the city. The road which first I followed gradually faded out on the open plain. Then I cut diagonally across country in the direction of the foot-hills. Near to the city as it was this bit of country, after weeks of drought, was like a veritable desert. Underfoot was the hot alkali dust, where grew the short plain-grass that lay whitened in tufts of crisping curls, as though dead beyond all reviving. Thick on every side was a growth of stunted cactus, well in keeping with the character of the plain, while the deeper green of the long, sharp Spanish needles was a sad mockery of fertility. Along occasional ravines, washed deep by sudden, rain-fed streams whose beds now lay stony and parched and baked under the hot sun, were here and there clusters of scrub-oaks, small in growth but with their wiry branches spreading a luxuriance of small oval leaves which supplied the welcome of a shadow in a desert land. At intervals among the dry, tufted grass small sand-heaps appeared, and above them the heads of prairie dogs, piping shrill warning of suspicious approach, or darting in swift flight from one burrow to another.