Mountains

They followed the highway south and east along the foot of the range, and the country changed under them, and Henry began to come back.

The mountains were not the mountains of home. The mountains of home had been a blue idea at the edge of the plain, a wall she had watched from a porch. These were the things themselves, the real Rockies, and they came up out of the foothills day by day as she climbed toward them until they filled the whole of the sky on the right hand, gray stone going up past where the trees would grow, past where anything would grow, into a country of rock and snow and cloud that had never cared for a single living thing and never would. There was a beauty in them that frightened her. She had not known a thing could be beautiful and want you dead at the same time until she was up in them, until she saw how the same slope that took the evening light like something out of a church would kill you overnight if you camped wrong on it, would freeze you where you lay and not know it had. The country of the plains had been indifferent to her. These mountains felt closer to hostile, older, more purely themselves, and she went up into them the way you go into deep water, carefully, respecting the thing that could take you.