The faculty¹ of observation was never highly developed in Thea Kronborg. A great deal escaped her eye as she passed through the world. But the things which were for her, she saw; she experienced them physically² and remembered them as if they had once been a part of herself. The roses she used to see in the florists’ shops in Chicago were merely roses. But when she thought of the moonflowers that grew over Mrs. Tellamantez’s door, it was as if she had been that vine and had opened up in white flowers every night. There were memories of light on the sand hills, of masses of prickly-pear blossoms she had found in the desert in early childhood, of the late afternoon sun pouring through the grape leaves and the mint bed in Mrs. Kohler’s garden, which she would never lose. These recollections were a part of her mind and personality. In Chicago she had got almost nothing that went into her subconscious³ self and took root there. But here, in Panther Canyon⁴, there were again things which seemed destined⁵ for her.  
Panther Canyon was the home of innumerable swallows. They built nests in the wall far above the hollow groove⁶ in which Thea’s own rock chamber⁷ lay. They seldom ventured above the rim⁸ of the canyon, to the flat, wind-swept tableland. Their world was the blue air-river between the canyon walls. In that blue gulf⁹ the arrow-shaped birds swam all day long, with only an occasional movement of the wings. The only sad thing about them was their timidity; the way in which they lived their lives between the echoing cliffs and never dared to rise out of the shadow of the canyon walls. As they swam past her door, Thea often felt how easy it would be to dream one’s life out in some cleft¹⁰ in the world.
 
From the ancient dwelling¹¹ there came always a dignified¹², unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter,—like the aromatic¹³ smell which the dwarf¹⁴ cedars¹⁶ gave out in the sun,—but always present, a part of the air one breathed. At night, when Thea dreamed about the canyon,—or in the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating it,—her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in sunlight, the swallows, the cedar¹⁵ smell, and that peculiar¹⁷ sadness—a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude¹⁸ eternally.
 
Standing¹⁹ up in her lodge²⁰, Thea could with her thumb nail dislodge flakes²¹ of carbon from the rock roof—the cooking-smoke of the Ancient People. They were that near! A timid, nest-building folk, like the swallows. How often Thea remembered Ray Kennedy’s moralizing about the cliff cities. He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one’s best. On the first day that Thea climbed the water trail she began to have intuitions about the women who had worn the path, and who had spent so great a part of their lives going up and down it. She found herself trying to walk as they must have walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins which she had never known before,—which must have come up to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her back as she climbed.
 
The empty houses, among which she wandered in the afternoon, the blanketed one in which she lay all morning, were haunted by certain fears and desires; feelings about warmth and cold and water and physical strength. It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on which she lay; ............