At the top of Vernal Fall, he walked across a broad, almost level expanse of dry white granite, one hand on an iron railing, and stood near the wide, sleek green lip of plummeting water. Here was the noise and the power, but little of the wetness; observation and immediacy and yet isolation. The true experience, Edward thought, would be sweeping down the falls in the middle of the water, suspended in cold green and white, curtains of bubbles and long translucent vertical surfaces distorting all sky and earth. What would it be like to live as a water sprite, able to magically suspend oneself in the middle of certain death?

He looked across at Liberty Cap and thought again of the vast granite spaces within the domes, unseen. Why an obsession with places out of view?

He frowned in concentration, trying to bring up the monstrous big thought he had so loosely hooked. Living things see only the surface, can't exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike . . .

There had been only three other people on the trail that morning, one descending, two climbing behind Edward. Another he had not seen, a blond-haired woman in a tan parka and dark blue shorts lugging a big expensive blue backpack. She stood on the opposite side of the granite block, looking over Emerald Lake, the pool where water from 600-foot Nevada Fall rested before slipping over the shorter Vernal Fall. She must have camped overnight, or was perhaps on the morning leg of a long trek around the rim of the valley.

The woman turned and Edward saw she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes, and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving. He looked away quickly, all too intensely aware she was outside his range. He had long since learned that women this beautiful paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing.

Still, she seemed to be alone.

Came that high, painful interior singing he had always known when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing. It was not a sensation he wanted now; he did not wish to be seduced away from worshiping the land, the Earth, to focus on a single woman, let alone one he could not possibly have. The woman or women he had imagined the night before would not evoke this kind of response; they would be safe, undemanding, undistressing. Quickly, with nothing more than a polite smile and nod, he passed the woman where she stood by the bridge and continued along the trail.