II
THEA'S life at the Ottenburg ranch was simple and full
of light, like the days themselves. She awoke every
morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted
through the curtainless windows of her room at the ranch
house. After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went
down to the canyon. Usually she did not return until
sunset.
Panther Canyon was like a thousand others--one of
those abrupt fissures with which the earth in the Southwest
is riddled; so abrupt that you might walk over the edge of
any one of them on a dark night and never know what had
happened to you. This canyon headed on the Ottenburg
ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was acces-
sible only at its head. The canyon walls, for the first two
hundred feet below the surface, were perpendicular cliffs,
striped with even-running strata of rock. From there on
to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were shelving,
and lightly fringed with PINONS and dwarf cedars. The
effect was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one.
The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular
outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge began.
There a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had
been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like
a deep groove running along the sides of the canyon. In
this hollow (like a great fold in the rock) the Ancient
People had built their houses of yellowish stone and mor-
tar. The over-hanging cliff above made a roof two hun-
dred feet thick. The hard stratum below was an ever-
lasting floor. The houses stood along in a row, like the
buildings in a city block, or like a barracks.
In both walls of the canyon the same streak of soft rock
had been washed out, and the long horizontal groove had
been built up with houses. The dead city had thus two
streets, one set in either cliff, facing each other across the
ravine, with a river of blue air between them.
The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these
two streets went on for four miles or more, interrupted by
the abrupt turnings of the gorge, but beginning again
within each turn. The canyon had a dozen of these false
endings near its head. Beyond, the windings were larger
and less perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles,
too narrow, precipitous, and terrible for man to follow it.
The Cliff Dwellers liked wide canyons, where the great
cliffs caught the sun. Panther Canyon had been deserted
for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries
came into Arizona, but the masonry of the houses was
still wonderfully firm; had crumbled only where a landslide
or a rolling boulder had torn it.
All the houses in the canyon were clean with the clean-
ness of sun-baked, wind-swept places, and they all smelled
of the tough little cedars that twisted themselves into the
very doorways. One of these rock-rooms Thea took for her
own. Fred had told her how to make it comfortable. The
day after she came old Henry brought over on one of the
pack-ponies a roll of Navajo blankets that belonged to
Fred, and Thea lined her cave with them. The room was
not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch the
stone roof with her finger-tips. This was her old idea: a
nest in a high cliff, full of sun. All morning long the sun
beat upon her cliff, while the ruins on the opposite side of
the canyon were in shadow. In the afternoon, when she
had the shade of two hundred feet of rock wall, the ruins
on the other side of the gulf stood out in the blazing sun-
light. Before her door ran the narrow, winding path that
had been the street of the Ancient People. The yucca and
niggerhead cactus grew everywhere. From her doorstep
she looked out on the ocher-colored slope that ran down
several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was
sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale
that the shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out
sharper than the trees themselves. When Thea first came,
the chokecherry bushes were in blossom, and the scent of
them was almost sickeningly sweet after a shower. At the
very bottom of the canyon, along the stream, there was a
thread of bright, flickering, golden-green,--cottonwood
seedlings. They made a living, chattering screen behind
which she took her bath every morning.
Thea went down to the stream by the Indian water
trail. She had found a bathing-pool with a sand bottom,
where the creek was damned by fallen trees. The climb
back was long and steep, and when she reached her little
house in the cliff she always felt fresh delight in its com-
fort and inaccessibility. By the time she got there, the
woolly red-and-gray blankets were saturated with sun-
light, and she sometimes fell asleep as soon as she stretched
her body on their warm surfaces. She used to wonder at
her own inactivity. She could lie there hour after hour in
the sun and listen to the strident whir of the big locusts,
and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All
her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she
had been born behind time and had been trying to catch
up. Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon
the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to
catch up with her. She had got to a place where she was
out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected
effort.
Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding
pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind--almost
in her hands. They were scarcely clear enough to be called
ideas. They had something to do with fragrance and color
and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She was
singing very little now, but a song would go through her
head all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was
like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was
much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of
remembering. Music had never come to her in that sensu-
ous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled
with, had always brought anxiety and exaltation and cha-
grin--never content and indolence. Thea began to won-
der whether people could not utterly lose the power to
work, as they can lose their voice or their memory. She
had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to
another--as if it mattered! And now her power to think
seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation. She
could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color,
like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones
outside her door; or she could become a continuous repeti-
tion of sound, like the cicadas.
