The birds were singing their praise of the comforting sunlight. Delicate ferns, unmolested by the frost, waved their green fronds above stones set in the cañon walls, their stems upreared from soft, vari-coloured mossbanks as lustrous and yielding as Oriental rugs and sparkling with diamonds of dew. A pensive languor pervaded the cañon, a sort of armistice between the mellow sun warmth and the gorge’s lifelong heritage of clammy coldness. It made these human beings moody. The warmth was the gipsy warmth of early springtime, when the smells of earth are sweetest, as, deep down within the soil, the sleepy seeds begin to rub their eyes and stretch in their great awakening to a short life of ceaseless struggles. The pair were moody because they realized that it was not spring, that the half-he
