THE APPROACH 



19 



strip of sand or water ? But there is a sim- 

 plicity about large masses simplicity in 

 breadth, space and distance that is inviting 

 and ennobling. And there is something very 

 restful about the horizontal line. Things that 

 lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peace- 

 ful with them. Furthermore, the waste places 

 of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts for- 

 saken of men and given over to loneliness, have 

 a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird 

 solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, 

 are the very things with which every desert 

 wanderer eventually falls in love. You think 

 that very strange perhaps ? Well, the beauty 

 of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-day 

 people admit its truth ; and the grandeur of 

 the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the 

 desert gives it proof. 



But the sun-tanned people who lived on this 

 mountain top never gave thought to masses, 

 or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They lived 

 here, it may be from necessity at first, and then 

 stayed on because they loved the open wind- 

 blown country, the shining orange-hued sands, 

 the sweeping mesas, the great swing of the 

 horizontal circle, the flat desolation, the un- 

 broken solitude. Nor ever knew why they 



