Thus it comes about that today besides its temples erected in cities, monasteries in the wilds are being dedicated to astronomy as in the past to faith; monasteries made to commune with its spirit, as temples are to communicate the letter of its law. Pioneers in such profession, those already in existence are but the precursors of many yet to come as science shall more and more recognize their need. Advance in knowledge demands what they alone can give. Primitive, too, they must be as befits the still austere sincerity of a cult, in which the simplest structures are found to be the best.
Still the very wildness of the life their devotee is forced to lead has in it a certain fittingness for his post in its primeval detachment from the too earthbound, in concept as in circumstance. Withdrawn from contact with his kind, he is by that much raised above human prejudice and limitation. To sally forth into the untrod wilderness in the cold and dark of a winter’s small hours of the morning, with the snow feet deep upon the ground and the frosty stars for mute companionship, is almost to forget one’s self a man for the solemn awe of one’s surroundings. Fitting portal to communion with another world, it is through such avenue one enters on his quest where the common and familiar no longer jostle the unknown and the strange. Nor is the stillness of the stars invaded when some long unearthly howl, like the wail of a lost soul, breaks the slumber of the mesa forest, marking the prowling presence of a stray coyote. Gone as it came, it dies in the distance on the air that gave it birth; and the gloom of the pines swallows up one’s vain peering after something palpable, their tops alone decipherable in dark silhouette against the sky. From amid surroundings that for their height and their intenancy fringe the absolute silence of space the observer must set forth who purposes to cross it to another planetary world.
But the isolation of his journey is not always so forbidding. His coming back is no less girt with grandeur of a different though equally detached a kind. Even before the stars begin to dim in warning to him to return, a faint suffusion as of half-suspected light creeps into the border of the eastern sky. Against it, along the far pine-clad horizon, mesa after mesa in shaggy lines of sentineling earth, stands forth dark marshaled in the gloom, informed with prescience of what is soon to come. Imperceptibly the pallor grows, blanching the face of night and one by one extinguishing the stars. Slowly then it takes on color, tingeing ever so faintly to a flush that swells and deepens as the minutes pass. One had said the sky lay dreaming of the sun in pale imagery at first that gathers force and feeling till the dreamer turns thus rosy red in slumbering supposition of reality. Then the blush dies out. The crimson fades to pink, the pink to ashes. The stars have disappeared and yet it is not day. It is the supreme moment of the dawn, the hush with which the Earth awaits its full awakening. For now again the color gathers in the east, not with the impalpable suffusion it had before but nearer and more vivid. No longer reflectively remote, rays imminent of the sun strike the upper air, the most adventurously refrangible turning the underside of a few stray clouds into flame-hued bars of glowing metal. They burn thus in the silent east first red, then orange, and then gold, each spectral tint in prismatic revelation coming to join the next till in a sudden blinding burst of splendor the solar disk tops the horizon’s rim.