He could scarcely
dissociate them from the present, for the bitter-sweet smell of tree and
bush, the almost inaudible sigh of breeze, the opening and shutting of
the great white stars in the blue dome, the silence, the sense of the
invisible void beneath him--all were thought-provoking parts of that past
of which nothing could ever be forgotten. And it was a silence which
brought much to the ear that could hear. It was a silence penetrated by
faint and distant sounds, by mourning wolf, or moan of wind in a
splintered crag. Weird and low, an inarticulate voice, it wailed up from
the desert, winding along the hollow trail, freeing itself in the wide
air, and dying away. He had often heard the scream of lion and cry of
wildcat, but this was the strange sound of which August Naab had told
him, the mysterious call of canyon and desert night.
Daylight showed Echo Cliffs to be of vastly greater range than the sister
plateau across the river. The roll of cedar level, the heave of craggy
ridge, the dip of white-sage valley gave this side a diversity widely
differing from the two steps of the Vermillion tableland.
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