After waiting a
few days, I gladly hailed a broad-browed cloud coming grandly on from
the west in big promising blackness, very unlike the white sailors of the
summer skies. Under the lee of a rim-ledge, with another snow-lover, I
watched its movements as it took possession of the canon and all the
adjacent region in sight. Trailing its gray fringes over the spiry tops
of the great temples and towers, it gradually settled lower, embracing
them all with ineffable kindness and gentleness of touch, and fondled the
little cedars and pines as they quivered eagerly in the wind like young
birds begging their mothers to feed them. The first flakes and crystals
began to fly about noon, sweeping straight up the middle of the canon, and
swirling in magnificent eddies along the sides. Gradually the hearty swarms
closed their ranks, and all the canon was lost in gray gloom except a short
section of the wall and a few trees beside us, which looked glad with snow
in their needles and about their feet as they leaned out over the gulf.
Suddenly the storm opened with magical effect to the north over the canon
of Bright Angel Creek, inclosing a sunlit mass of the canon architecture,
spanned by great white concentric arches of cloud like the bows of a
silvery aurora. Above these and a little back of them was a series of
upboiling purple clouds, and high above all, in the background, a range
of noble cumuli towered aloft like snow-laden mountains, their pure pearl
bosses flooded with sunshine.
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