"Grey, Zane - The U.P. Trail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the
most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance,
if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy
to this?

--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In ACROSS THE PLAINS




1

In the early sixties a trail led from the broad Missouri, swirling
yellow and turgid between its green-groved borders, for miles and
miles out upon the grassy Nebraska plains, turning westward over the
undulating prairie, with its swales and billows and long, winding
lines of cottonwoods, to a slow, vast heave of rising ground--
Wyoming--where the herds of buffalo grazed and the wolf was lord and
the camp-fire of the trapper sent up its curling blue smoke from
beside some lonely stream; on and on over the barren lands of
eternal monotony, all so gray and wide and solemn and silent under
the endless sky; on, ever on, up to the bleak, black hills and into
the waterless gullies and through the rocky gorges where the deer
browsed and the savage lurked; then slowly rising to the pass
between the great bold peaks, and across the windy uplands into
Utah, with its verdant valleys, green as emeralds, and its haze-
filled canons and wonderful wind-worn cliffs and walls, and its pale
salt lakes, veiled in the shadows of stark and lofty rocks, dim,
lilac-colored, austere, and isolated; ever onward across Nevada, and
ever westward, up from desert to mountain, up into California, where
the white streams rushed and roared and the stately pines towered,
and seen from craggy heights, deep down, the little blue lakes
gleamed like gems; finally sloping to the great descent, where the
mountain world ceased and where, out beyond the golden land, asleep
and peaceful, stretched the illimitable Pacific, vague and grand
beneath the setting sun.




2

Deep in the Wyoming hills lay a valley watered by a stream that ran
down from Cheyenne Pass; a band of Sioux Indians had an encampment
there. Viewed from the summit of a grassy ridge, the scene was
colorful and idle and quiet, in keeping with the lonely, beautiful
valley. Cottonwoods and willows showed a bright green; the course of
the stream was marked in dark where the water ran, and light where
the sand had bleached; brown and black dots scattered over the