They had left the ranch7 house that morning a little after three o’clock, having packed their camp equipment the day before, and had crossed the open pasture land with their lantern while the stars were still bright. During the descent into the canyon by lantern-light, they were chilled through their coats and sweaters. The lantern crept slowly along the rock trail, where the heavy air seemed to offer resistance. The voice of the stream at the bottom of the gorge8 was hollow and threatening, much louder and deeper than it ever was by day—another voice altogether. The sullenness9 of the place seemed to say that the world could get on very well without people, red or white; that under the human world there was a geological world, conducting its silent, immense operations which were indifferent to man. Thea had often seen the desert sunrise,—a lighthearted affair, where the sun springs out of bed and the world is golden in an instant. But this canyon seemed to waken like an old man, with rheum and stiffness of the joints10, with heaviness, and a dull, malignant11 mind. She crouched12 against the wall while the stars faded, and thought what courage the early races must have had to endure so much for the little they got out of life.
At last a kind of hopefulness broke in the air. In a moment the pine trees up on the edge of the rim13 were flashing with coppery fire. The thin red clouds which hung above their pointed14 tops began to boil and move rapidly, weaving in and out like smoke. The swallows darted15 out of their rock houses as at a signal, and flew upward, toward the rim. Little brown birds began to chirp16 in the bushes along the watercourse down at the bottom of the ravine, where everything was still dusky and pale. At first the golden light seemed to hang like a wave upon the rim of the canyon; the trees and bushes up there, which one scarcely noticed at noon, stood out magnified by the slanting17 rays. Long, thin streaks18 of light began to reach quiveringly down into the canyon. The red sun rose rapidly above the tops of the blazing pines, and its glow burst into the gulf, about the very doorstep on which Thea sat. It bored into the wet, dark underbrush. The dripping cherry bushes, the pale aspens, and the frosty piñons were glittering and trembling, swimming in the liquid gold. All the pale, dusty little herbs of the bean family, never seen by any one but a botanist19, became for a moment individual and important, their silky leaves quite beautiful with dew and light. The arch of sky overhead, heavy as lead a little while before, lifted, became more and more transparent20, and one could look up into depths of pearly blue.
The savor21 of coffee and bacon mingled22 with the smell of wet cedars23 drying, and Fred called to Thea that he was ready for her. They sat down in the doorway of his kitchen, with the warmth of the live coals behind them and the sunlight on their faces, and began their breakfast, Mrs. Biltmer’s thick coffee cups and the cream bottle between them, the coffee-pot and frying-pan conveniently keeping hot among the embers.
“I thought you were going back on the whole proposition, Thea, when you were crawling along with that lantern. I couldn’t get a word out of you.”
“I know. I was cold and hungry, and I didn’t believe there was going to be any morning, anyway. Didn’t you feel queer, at all?”
Fred squinted24 above his smoking cup. “Well, I am never strong for getting up before the sun. The world looks unfurnished. When I first lit the fire and had a square look at you, I thought I’d got the wrong girl. Pale, grim—you were a sight!”
Thea leaned back into the shadow of the rock room and warmed her hands over the coals. “It was dismal25 enough. How warm these walls are, all the way round; and your breakfast is so good. I’m all right now, Fred.”
“Yes, you’re all right now.” Fred lit a cigarette and looked at her critically as her head emerged into the sun again. “You get up every morning just a little bit handsomer than you were the day before. I’d love you just as much if you were not turning into one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen; but you are, and that’s a fact to be reckoned with.” He watched her across the thin line of smoke he blew from his lips. “What are you going to do with all that beauty and all that talent, Miss Kronborg?”
She turned away to the fire again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she muttered with an awkwardness which did not conceal26 her pleasure.
Ottenburg laughed softly. “Oh, yes, you do! Nobody better! You’re a close one, but you give yourself away sometimes, like everybody else. Do you know, I’ve decided27 that you never do a single thing without an ulterior motive28.” He threw away his cigarette, took out his tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe. “You ride and fence and walk and climb, but I know that all the while you’re getting somewhere in your mind. All these things are instruments; and I, too, am an instrument.” He looked up in time to intercept29 a quick, startled glance from Thea. “Oh, I don’t mind,” he chuckled30; “not a bit. Every woman, every interesting woman, has ulterior motives31, many of ’em less creditable than yours. It’s your constancy that amuses me. You must have been doing it ever since you were two feet high.”
Thea looked slowly up at her companion’s good-humored face. His eyes, sometimes too restless and sympathetic in town, had grown steadier and clearer in the open air. His short curly beard and yellow hair had reddened in the sun and wind. The pleasant vigor32 of his person was always delightful33 to her, something to signal to and laugh with in a world of negative people. With Fred she was never becalmed. There was always life in the air, always something coming and going, a rhythm of feeling and action,—stronger than the natural accord of youth. As she looked at him, leaning against the sunny wall, she felt a desire to be frank with him. She was not willfully holding anything back. But, on the other hand, she could not force things that held themselves back. “Yes, it was like that when I was little,” she said at last. “I had to be close, as you call it, or go under. But I didn’t know I had been like that since you came. I’ve had nothing to be close about. I haven’t thought about anything but having a good time with you. I’ve just drifted.”
Fred blew a trail of smoke out into the breeze and looked knowing. “Yes, you drift like a rifle ball, my dear. It’s your—your direction that I like best of all. Most fellows wouldn’t, you know. I’m unusual.”
They both laughed, but Thea frowned questioningly. “Why wouldn’t most fellows? Other fellows have liked me.”
“Yes, serious fellows. You told me yourself they were all old, or solemn. But jolly fellows want to be the whole target. They would say you were all brain and muscle; that you have no feeling.”
She glanced at him sidewise. “Oh, they would, would they?”
“Of course they would,” Fred continued blandly34. “Jolly fellows have no imagination. They want to be the animating35 force. When they are not around, they want a girl to be—extinct,” he waved his hand. “Old fellows like Mr. Nathanmeyer understand your kind; but among the young ones, you are rather lucky to have found me. Even I wasn’t always so wise. I’ve had my time of thinking it would not bore me to be the Apollo of a homey flat, and I’ve paid out a trifle to learn better. All those things get very tedious unless they are hooked up with an idea of some sort. It’s because we don’t come out here only to look at each other and drink coffee that it’s so pleasant to—look at each other.” Fred drew on his pipe for a while, studying Thea’s abstraction. She was staring up at the far wall of the canyon with a troubled expression that drew her eyes narrow and her mouth hard. Her hands lay in her lap, one over the other, the fingers interlacing. “Suppose,” Fred came out at length,—“suppose I were to offer you what most of the young men I know would offer a girl they’d been sitting up nights about: a comfortable flat in Chicago, a summer camp up in the woods, musical evenings, and a family to bring up. Would it look attractive to you?”
Thea sat up straight and stared at him in alarm, glared into his eyes. “Perfectly36 hideous37!” she exclaimed.
Fred dropped back against the old stonework and laughed deep in his chest. “Well, don’t be frightened. I won’t offer them. You’re not a nest-building bird. You know I always liked your song, ‘Me for the jolt38 of the breakers!’ I understand.”
She rose impatiently and walked to the edge of the cliff. “It’s not that so much. It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag39 in you.” She stood for a moment as if she were tortured by uncertainty40, then turned suddenly back to him. “Don’t talk about these things any more now,” she entreated41. “It isn’t that I want to keep anything from you. The trouble is that I’ve got nothing to keep—except (you know as well as I) that feeling. I told you about it in Chicago once. But it always makes me unhappy to talk about it. It will spoil the day. Will you go for a climb with me?” She held out her hands with a smile so eager that it made Ottenburg feel how much she needed to get away from herself.
He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cordially, and stood swinging them back and forth42. “I won’t tease you. A word’s enough to me. But I love it, all the same. Understand?” He pressed her hands and dropped them. “Now, where are you going to drag me?”
“I want you to drag me. Over there, to the other houses. They are more interesting than these.” She pointed across the gorge to the row of white houses in the other cliff. “The trail is broken away, but I got up there once. It’s possible. You have to go to the bottom of the canyon, cross the creek43, and then go up hand-over-hand.”
Ottenburg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looked across at the distant dwellings44. “It’s an awful climb,” he sighed, “when I could be perfectly happy here with my pipe. However—” He took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the water trail. “Do you climb this path every day? You surely earn your bath. I went down and had a look at your pool the other afternoon. Neat place, with all those little cottonwoods. Must be very becoming.”
“Think so?” Thea said over her shoulder, as she swung round a turn.
“Yes, and so do you, evidently. I’m becoming expert at reading your meaning in your back. I’m behind you so much on these single-foot trails. You don’t wear stays, do you?”
“Not here.”
“I wouldn’t, anywhere, if I were you. They will make you less elastic45. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there’s a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when they’re well set up.”
Thea switched a piñon branch back at him. “Oh, I’ll never get fat! That I can promise you.”
Fred smiled, looking after her. “Keep that promise, no matter how many others you break,” he drawled.
The upward climb, after they had crossed the stream, was at first a breathless scramble46 through underbrush. When they reached the big boulders47, Ottenburg went first because he had the longer leg-reach, and gave Thea a hand when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged, sloping wall between them and the cliff-houses.
Ottenburg lay down under a pine tree and declared that he was going to have a pipe before he went any farther. “It’s a good thing to know when to stop, Thea,” he said meaningly.
“I’m not going to stop now until I get there,” Thea insisted. “I’ll go on alone.”
Fred settled his shoulder against the tree-trunk. “Go on if you like, but I’m here to enjoy myself. If you meet a rattler on the way, have it out with him.”
She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat. “I never have met one.”
“There’s reasoning for you,” Fred murmured languidly.
Thea turned away resolutely49 and began to go up the wall, using an irregular cleft50 in the rock for a path. The cliff, which looked almost perpendicular51 from the bottom, was really made up of ledges52 and boulders, and behind these she soon disappeared. For a long while Fred smoked with half-closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again. Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow53 as he heard the rattle48 of small stones among the rocks above. “In a temper,” he concluded; “do her good.” Then he subsided54 into warm drowsiness55 and listened to the locusts56 in the yuccas, and the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was never weary of assaulting the big pine.
Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether he wanted another, when he heard a call from the cliff far above him. Looking up, he saw Thea standing57 on the edge of a projecting crag. She waved to him and threw her arm over her head, as if she were snapping her fingers in the air.
As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf, with that great wash of air and the morning light about her, Fred recalled the brilliant figure at Mrs. Nathanmeyer’s. Thea was one of those people who emerge, unexpectedly, larger than we are accustomed to see them. Even at this distance one got the impression of muscular energy and audacity,—a kind of brilliancy of motion,—of a personality that carried across big spaces and expanded among big things. Lying still, with his hands under his head, Ottenburg rhetorically addressed the figure in the air. “You are the sort that used to run wild in Germany, dressed in their hair and a piece of skin. Soldiers caught ’em in nets. Old Nathanmeyer,” he mused58, “would like a peep at her now. Knowing old fellow. Always buying those Zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing. No sag in them either. Must be the cold climate.” He sat up. “She’ll begin to pitch rocks on me if I don’t move.” In response to another impatient gesture from the crag, he rose and began swinging slowly up the trail.
It was the afternoon of that long day. Thea was lying on a blanket in the door of her rock house. She and Ottenburg had come back from their climb and had lunch, and he had gone off for a nap in one of the cliff-houses farther down the path. He was sleeping peacefully, his coat under his head and his face turned toward the wall.
Thea, too, was drowsy59, and lay looking through halfclosed eyes up at the blazing blue arch over the rim of the canyon. She was thinking of nothing at all. Her mind, like her body, was full of warmth, lassitude, physical content. Suddenly an eagle, tawny60 and of great size, sailed over the cleft in which she lay, across the arch of sky. He dropped for a moment into the gulf between the walls, then wheeled, and mounted until his plumage was so steeped in light that he looked like a golden bird. He swept on, following the course of the canyon a little way and then disappearing beyond the rim. Thea sprang to her feet as if she had been thrown up from the rock by volcanic61 action. She stood rigid62 on the edge of the stone shelf, straining her eyes after that strong, tawny flight. O eagle of eagles! Endeavor, achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art! From a cleft in the heart of the world she saluted63 it...It had come all the way; when men lived in caves, it was there. A vanished race; but along the trails, in the stream, under the spreading cactus64, there still glittered in the sun the bits of their frail65 clay vessels66, fragments of their desire.
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1
canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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chasm
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| n.深坑，断层，裂口，大分岐，利害冲突 | |
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crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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ranch
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| n.大牧场，大农场 | |
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gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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sullenness
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| n. 愠怒, 沉闷, 情绪消沉 | |
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joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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malignant
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| adj.恶性的，致命的；恶意的，恶毒的 | |
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crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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darted
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| v.投掷，投射( dart的过去式和过去分词 )；向前冲，飞奔 | |
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chirp
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| v.(尤指鸟)唧唧喳喳的叫 | |
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slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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streaks
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| n.（与周围有所不同的）条纹( streak的名词复数 )；（通常指不好的）特征（倾向）；（不断经历成功或失败的）一段时期v.快速移动( streak的第三人称单数 )；使布满条纹 | |
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botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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transparent
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| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
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savor
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| vt.品尝，欣赏；n.味道，风味；情趣，趣味 | |
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mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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cedars
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| 雪松，西洋杉( cedar的名词复数 ) | |
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squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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25
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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intercept
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| vt.拦截，截住，截击 | |
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chuckled
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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vigor
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| n.活力，精力，元气 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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blandly
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| adv.温和地，殷勤地 | |
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animating
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| v.使有生气( animate的现在分词 )；驱动；使栩栩如生地动作；赋予…以生命 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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jolt
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| v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸 | |
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sag
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| v.下垂，下跌，消沉；n.下垂，下跌，凹陷，[航海]随风漂流 | |
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uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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entreated
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| 恳求，乞求( entreat的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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44
dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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45
elastic
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| n.橡皮圈，松紧带；adj.有弹性的；灵活的 | |
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scramble
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| v.爬行，攀爬，杂乱蔓延，碎片，片段，废料 | |
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47
boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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48
rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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resolutely
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| adj.坚决地，果断地 | |
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cleft
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| n.裂缝；adj.裂开的 | |
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perpendicular
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| adj.垂直的，直立的；n.垂直线，垂直的位置 | |
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ledges
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| n.（墙壁，悬崖等）突出的狭长部分( ledge的名词复数 )；（平窄的）壁架；横档；（尤指）窗台 | |
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eyebrow
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| n.眉毛，眉 | |
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subsided
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的过去式和过去分词 )；减弱；下降至较低或正常水平；一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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drowsiness
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| n.睡意；嗜睡 | |
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locusts
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| n.蝗虫( locust的名词复数 )；贪吃的人；破坏者；槐树 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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mused
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| v.沉思，冥想( muse的过去式和过去分词 )；沉思自语说（某事） | |
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drowsy
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| adj.昏昏欲睡的，令人发困的 | |
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tawny
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| adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色 | |
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61
volcanic
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| adj.火山的；象火山的；由火山引起的 | |
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rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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saluted
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| v.欢迎，致敬( salute的过去式和过去分词 )；赞扬，赞颂 | |
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cactus
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| n.仙人掌 | |
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65
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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66
vessels
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| n.血管( vessel的名词复数 )；船；容器；（具有特殊品质或接受特殊品质的）人 | |
参考例句： |
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