Book One Chapter 3 The Man

This delight in the town and its surroundings gained a new quality next morning as he looked from his window upon a single white cloud resting like a weary swan on the keen point of old Kanab. Though the mesas of New Mexico and the deserts of Arizona were his special field, he bared his head to the charm of "the high country."

Each summer, after months of prolonged peering into the hidden heart of microscopic things in his laboratory (he was both analytical chemist and biologist), it was his custom to return for a few weeks to huge, crude synthetic, nature for relief. After endless discussion of "whorls of force" and of "the office of germs in the human organism," he enjoyed the racy vernacular of the plainsman, to whom bacteria were as indifferent as blackberry-seeds. Each year he resolved to go to the forest, to the lake regions, or to the mountains; but as the day of departure drew near the desert and the strange peoples living thereon reasserted their dominion, and so he had continued to return to the sand, to the home of the horned toad and the rattlesnake. These trips restored the sane balance of his mind. To camp in the chaparral, to explore the source of streams, and to relive the wonder of the boy kept his faculties alert and keen.

His love of the sands and the purple buttes of the plain did not blind him to the beauty of coloring and the gracious majesty of these peaks, clothed as they were with the russet and gold and amber of ripened grasses, which grew even to the very summits (only the kingliest of the peaks were permitted to wear the ermine robes which denoted sovereignty); the Continental Divide was, indeed, much more impressive than he had expected it to be.