The Little Yankee Mine

A wide out-jutting wall of rock, uneven and precipitous, completely
shut off all view toward the broader valley of the Vila, as well as of
the town of San Juan, scarcely three miles distant. Beyond its stern
guardianship Echo Canyon stretched grim and desolate, running far back
into the very heart of the gold-ribbed mountains. The canyon, a mere
shapeless gash in the side of the great hills, was deep, long,
undulating, ever twisting about like some immense serpent, its sides
darkened by clinging cedars and bunches of chaparral, and rising in
irregular terraces of partially exposed rock toward a narrow strip of
blue sky. It was a fragment of primitive nature, as wild, gloomy,
desolate, and silent as though never yet explored by man.

A small clear stream danced and sang over scattered stones at the
bottom of this grim chasm, constantly twisting and curving from wall to
wall, generally half concealed from view by the dense growth of
overhanging bushes shadowing its banks. High up along the brown rock
wall the gleam of the afternoon sun rested warm and golden, but deeper
down within those dismal, forbidding depths there lingered merely a
purple twilight, while patches of white snow yet clung desperately to
the steep surrounding hills, or showered in powdery clouds from off the
laden cedars whenever the disturbing wind came soughing up the gorge.
Early birds were beginning to flit from tree to tree, singing their
welcome to belated Springtime; a fleecy cloud lazily floating far
overhead gave deeper background to the slender strip of over-arching
blue. It all combined to form a nature picture of primeval peace,
rendered peculiarly solemn by those vast ranges of overshadowing
mountains, and more deeply impressive by the grim silence and
loneliness, the seemingly total absence of human life.