He took her next to the high desert, to the canyonlands of southern Utah and northern Arizona. Down in the canyons at the side of pools the leaves of the cottonwoods were beginning to change from acid-green to pale yellow. The shade beneath the trees had a green-gold tone, reflected by the water. The canyon walls appeared rosy red at dawn, buff brown at noon, pink and lavender and purple through the continuum of evening and twilight. He parked the truck under the trees by a waterfall with plunge pool big enough for swimming. They played in the water nude as fish and made love in the hot sun on a limestone ledge slick as marble. He pointed out the ancient pictographs and petroglyphs on the rock wall above; she found new ones that he had overlooked. They filled their pockets with raisins and venison jerky and hiked for five miles up the canyon, wading the water, and found more pictures on the canyon walls, a dwelling of mud and stone in an inaccessible alcove in the cliff and a natural arch sculptured by erosion through a sandstone fin. The fin was twenty feet wide, a hundred high. The moon of evening floated on the ellipsoid patch of sky inside the arch: like a blue eye with white iris and pupil mounted in the socket of a rose-colored skull. One mourning dove chanted in the distance.

Are there more of those in here?

Natural arches? This is the biggest.

This place should be a national park.

He put a finger to his lips and looked around. The walls have ears.

And eyes. She smiled. Are we being selfish?

You’re damn right. Let them others find this place like we did. By looking for it. By dreaming of it.

They lingered in the canyons for two weeks, exploring pockets and corners in a maze of wonders. They slept under the stars, swam in the pools beneath waterfalls, climbed the range monoliths.

Henry, I’m frightened.

Why?

Because I’m so happy; I’ve never been so happy in my life; it’s frightening.

He held her in his arms, stroked her flowing hair, caressed the supple rondure of her breasts, arms, hips. He said nothing. He understood her fear and had no answer for it.

They camped for three days and nights on a point of naked stone two thousand five hundred feet above the Colorado River. The place had no name on the maps. Henry broke a bottle of wine on the rock and christened it Cape Claire. They were eighty miles by burro path, jeep trail and dirt track from the nearest county highway—a gravel-surfaced road connecting a place called Pipe Spring (pop. 10) to a place called Wolf Hole (pop. 0). They watched five small pretty boats—dories—pass beneath them on the river, pitching and yawing through whitewater rapids, bound for the stagnant cesspool of Lake Mead sixty miles downstream. They saw bighorn sheep scrambling from ledge to ledge on the cliffs below, on the crags above. Golden eagles, redtailed hawks, black vultures and raucous blue-black ravens circled in the air above and below. Lean stalks of agave grew by the side of sandy basins in the stone, seedpods rattling in the wind. A squall of rain passed through one night transforming each basin into a shallow tiger’s eye of water. They refilled their water cans cup by cup. The sun emerged from a range of clouds, the wind blew and by evening the pools were dry. They walked in twilight on a path through a silent village of basaltic boulders set on pedestals of mudstone. A coiled and excited rattlesnake challenged their advance. Henry squatted on his heels, spoke to the snake, stroked the underside of its neck with his stick until the snake became quiet, then lifted it draped on the stick to the side of the trail and set it safely down. They walked on, climbed a ridge, circled back to camp and watched the red sun sink beneath a quilted ceiling of clouds, a grand excessive baroque display of color and fire that overspread the entire sky for an hour and lingered in the west for three hours more.