Night has the effect of seeming to double distances. At the pinnacle of this crag we paused a second. Below, we looked down vast depths upon the points of lesser pinnacles, jumbled in the valley. There was no bottom to the Pit directly under our headlights. Used to scenery with a bottom to it, however remote, we had rather a prejudice in favor of it. Beyond the radius of our lights we could pierce the blackness only in vague outlines. Then we dropped down, taking each switchback with caution. The nose of the car swung periodically out over the edge, daring our brakes to go the inch more which meant a mile--downward. One loose rock, of which there were so many, might send us spinning, crashing among the treetops below. But why harrow the reader unnecessarily? It must be evident we reached the bottom in safety. Yet halfway down I was not so sure of the outcome, for a spark of light and a little click, regular and ominous, came from the engine, just when the grade pitched the car head-down. I took the turns with my heart in my mouth. When we reached fairly level ground again we investigated. It was only a loose wire, connecting with the cylinders, but a little longer descend and we might have had a cross circuit,--and trouble. It was good to have the valley come up to us. It was very good to see little friendly lights twinkling in the vast circle of the hills. The lights meant the Inn, and our day’s journey ended. The host welcomed us, rather astonished that two Easterners should have risked that hill at night. Had there been any other way we should have taken it, but no grassy meadows offered where we could run the car in safety; only empty chasms or perpendicular cliffs. Once on the road we had to go on. Then, too, we preferred the hot and appetizing food of the Inn to our own amateur camp cooking. Food is a powerful magnet. Toward sunset next day we had passed beyond the lake of cobalt which science had set in the golden circlet of the desert. We had left the haunts of motors. As we rose from one hilly crest to the next higher, we met only an occasional prospector, afoot, or an emigrant from Utah with an old-time prairie schooner and a flock of burros. We were on that further branch of the T-shaped trail named Apache, and later we turned due north, and left it for mountain ranges of sweeping loveliness. I cannot, at the risk of boring, write of mountains without enthusiasm. These were on a colossal scale, as befits the Rockies, but their grandeur did not repel. They were homey mountains. As we traveled upward over the same kind of shelf-road with which the Winkleman trail had made us so quickly familiar, we could look down upon range after range, their blues and ochres melting together as far as eye could reach.