k upon which I
composed myself, to watch, to feel.

A stiffening of my neck made me aware that I had been continually
looking up at the looming arch. I found that it never seemed the same
any two moments. Near at hand it was too vast a thing for immediate
comprehension. I wanted to ponder on what had formed it--to reflect
upon its meaning as to age and force of nature. Yet it seemed that all
I could do was to see. White stars hung along the dark curved
line. The rim of the arch appeared to shine. The moon was up there
somewhere. The far side of the canyon was now a blank black wall. Over
its towering rim showed a pale glow. It brightened. The shades in the
canyon lightened, then a white disk of moon peeped over the dark line.
The bridge turned to silver.

It was then that I became aware of the presence of Nas ta Bega. Dark,
silent, statuesque, with inscrutable face uplifted, with all that was
spiritual of the Indian suggested by a somber and tranquil knowledge
of his place there, he represented to me that which a solitary figure
of human life represents in a great painting. Nonnezoshe needed life,
wild life, life of its millions of years--and here stood the dark and
silent Indian.

Long afterward I walked there alone, to and fro, under the bridge. The
moon had long since crossed the streak of star-fired blue above, and
the canyon was black in shadow. At times a current of wind, with all
the strangeness of that strange country in its moan, rushed through
the great stone arch. At other times there was silence such as I
imagined might have dwelt deep in the center of the earth. And again
an owl hooted, and the sound was nameless. It had a mocking echo. An
echo of night, silence, gloom, melancholy, death, age, eternity!

The Indian lay asleep with his dark face upturned, and the other
sleepers lay calm and white in the starlight. I seemed to see in them
the meaning of life and the past--the illimitable train of faces
that had shone under the stars. There was something nameless in that
canyon, and whether or not it was what the Indian embodied in the
great Nonnezoshe, or the life of the present, or the death of the
ages, or the nature so magnificently manifested in those silent,
dreaming, waiting walls--the truth was that there was a spirit.

I did sleep a few hours under Nonnezoshe, and when I awoke the tip of
the arch was losing its cold darkness and beginning to shine. The sun
had just risen high enough over some lo