Explore "Thurston of Orchard Valley" by Harold Bindloss on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a lowering afternoon in the Fall, when Thurston and Julius Savine stood talking together upon a spray-drenched ledge in the depths of a British Columbian canyon. On the crest of the smooth-scarped hillside, which stretched back from the sheer face of rock far overhead, stood what looked like a tiny fretwork in ebony, and consisted of two-hundred-foot conifers. Here and there a clamorous torrent had worn out a gully, and, with Thurston's assistance, Savine had accomplished the descent of one of the less precipitous. Elsewhere the rocks had been rubbed into smooth walls, between which the river had fretted out its channel during countless ages. The water was coming down in a mad green flood, for the higher snows had melted fast under the autumn sun, and the clay beneath the glaciers had stained it.
Foam licked the ledges, a roaring white wake streamed behind each boulder's ugly head, and the whole gloomy canyon rang with the thunder of a rapid, whose filmy stream whirled in the chilly breeze.