The Everlasting Whisper | Page 2

the layers of tan; that in doing so he shed from his mind
many of the artificialities of the twentieth century and remembered
ancient instincts. His deep chest knew the tricks of proper breathing; he
would come to the top of a steep climb with unlaboured breath. He
stood tall and stalwart, filled with vigorous strength in repose like the

straight valiant cedars. His eyes were black and piercing, as keen as
those of the hawk which, circling in the deeper sky, had seen him when
he moved; he, too, had seen the hawk. All about him was a lustily
masculine phase of the world, giant trees dominating giant slopes,
rugged boulders upheaved, iron cliffs defying time and battling the
years; he, like them, was virile, his sex clothing him magnificently. He
had not shaved for three days and yet, instead of looking untidy, was
but clothed in the greater vitality. While his eyes sped swiftly hither
and thither, now busied with wide groupings, now catching small
details, his face was impassive. In keeping both with his own
magnificent physique and the rugged note of the forest, it was the face
of a man who had defied and battled.
Beyond the lake a peak upthrust its rocky front into the sky. It frowned
across the ridges, darkened by the shadows which its own irregularities
cast athwart its massive features. But the sun, slowly as it rolled, sought
out those shadows; they moved, crept to other hiding-places, and the
golden light coaxed a subdued, soft gentleness across the massive
boulders. This, too, the man saw.
He stood looking out across the ridges and so to the final bulwark
against the sky still white with last December. He sought landmarks
and measured distance, not in miles but in hours. Then he glanced
briefly at the sun. But now, before starting on again, he turned from the
more distant landscape and, remembering the immediate scene about
him as he had viewed it last, drowsing in the Indian summer of last
October, he noted everywhere the handiwork of young June. The eyes
which had been keen and alert filled suddenly with a shining
brightness.
The springtime, eternally youthful coquette, had come with a great
outward display of timidity and shyness into the sternly solemn forest
land of the high Sierra. To the last fine detail and exquisite touch was
she, more here than elsewhere, softly, prettily, daintily feminine, her
light heart idly set on wooing from its calm and abstracted aloofness
this region of granite and lava, of rugged chasms and august ancient
trees. She filled the air with fragrances, lightly shaken; she scattered

bright fragile flowers to brighten the earth and clear bird-notes to
sparkle through the air. Hesitant always in the seeming, she came with
that shy step of hers to the feet of glooming precipices; under crests
where the snow clung on she played at indifference, loitering with a
new flower, knowing that little by little the thaw would answer her
veiled efforts, that in the end the monarch of all the brooding mountain
tops would discard the white mantle of aloofness and thrill to her
embrace; knowing, too, that with each successive conquest made secure
she would only laugh in that singing voice of hers and turn her back
and pass on. On and on, over ridges and ranges, and so around the
world.
The woods lay steeped in sunshine, enwrapped in characteristic
quietude. There was no wind to ruffle the man's hair, no sound of a
falling cone or of dead leaves crackling under a squirrel's foot. And yet
the man had the air now of one listening, hearkening to the silence
itself. For silence among the pines is not the dead void of desert lands,
but a great hush like the finger-to-lip command in a sleeper's room, or
the still message of a sea-shell held to the ear. The countless millions of
cedar and pine needles seemed as motionless as the very mountains
themselves, yet it was they who laid the gently audible command upon
the balmy afternoon and whispered the great hush. That whisper the
man heard, it seemed to him, less with his ears than with his soul.
He went back to the tree against which he had rested and picked up his
hat and a small canvas roll. And yet again, with his hat in his hand, he
stood motionless, his eyes lingering along the cliff tops across the little
lake, his attitude that of a man listening to an invitation which he would
like to accept but in the end meant to refuse. Already he had marked
out the way he planned to go, and still the nearer peaks with the
sunshine upon them called to him. One would have hazarded that they
were familiar from