The life pleased the dentist beyond words. The still, colossal mountains
took him back again like a returning prodigal, and vaguely, without
knowing why, he yielded to their influence--their immensity, their
enormous power, crude and blind, reflecting themselves in his own
nature, huge, strong, brutal in its simplicity. And this, though he only
saw the mountains at night. They appeared far different then than in the
daytime. At twelve o'clock he came out of the mine and lunched on the
contents of his dinner-pail, sitting upon the embankment of the track,
eating with both hands, and looking around him with a steady ox-like
gaze. The mountains rose sheer from every side, heaving their gigantic
crests far up into the night, the black peaks crowding together, and
looking now less like beasts than like a company of cowled giants. In
the daytime they were silent; but at night they seemed to stir and rouse
themselves. Occasionally the stamp-mill stopped, its thunder ceasing
abruptly. Then one could hear the noises that the mountains made in
their living. From the canyon, from the crowding crests, from the whole
immense landscape, there rose a steady and prolonged sound, coming
from all sides at once.
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