GLACIER PARK 47 



ours in northwestern Montana. Naked and sudden, 

 they leap up out of the prairie grass, a vast blue range 

 of them vanishing into the north, vanishing into the 

 south, on their march from the Arctic ice to the Equator. 

 They march beside the prairie flowers, their snowfields 

 glittering white above the carpet of lupines and gail- 

 lardias, and whisper of the mysteries their blue folds 

 hold. At three o'clock you see them sharp and clear, 

 but not till eight do you reach them, and as you leave 

 the stuffy train a wind is coining down from those snow- 

 fields, over the fringing forest of fir, cool, caressing, 

 fragrant. "Open your eyes," they say to you. Then, 

 "Open your lungs and breathe, deep, deep!'* But the 

 twilight rose is blushing now on the snowfields, a pearly 

 blue to the eastward has made the rolling prairie as the 

 sea. "Now, open your heart," they say, "for you are 

 doomed to be our lover." 



The road northward into the depths of the range, 

 once only a dim trail but now passable for motors, runs 

 for a considerable distance over the prairie, as if it were 

 looking for an opening where it could squeeze into the 

 blue wall. No entrance could be better devised, for a 

 mountain, a lovely vale, a rock-walled lake, resents too 

 sudden an approach. Even in so little a thing as a 

 garden, the wise man knows it must not all be visible 

 from the veranda, or a secret magic has escaped. There 

 must be climaxes and surprises, and at least one nook 

 which shuts out all view save of itself. So the mountain 



