Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her regard.
When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west, wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous--what it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only faintly divine.
At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride, a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs! Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.
For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be dark by the time we reach the hotel."
Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a sense of actual relief that we reëntered our apartment. Our eyes ached with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds, gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.