For the sake of this same sentimental archeology, Peter occasionally returned to Golgotha, ignoring the cries of the more lately crucified because they were not the ONE; so paying them witness could only erode his recollections of that Crucifixion which he was bound to consider final. — Water, water! moaned a man on a cross. — Oh, what a cursed place this was! — But Peter's occupation must now be to overcome such impressions. Kneeling with clasped hands, he lowered his head and began to search for beauty in the ridges below him, whose tan boulders were ridden with cracks so that they seemed to be stacks of half-melted bricks from some old time, and channels and canyons of the same rough rock ran between them, all edges sandblasted smooth, but their stone-flesh was grainy with sharp quartz crystals that could scrape hands to bleeding. Yucca plants grew in fractures or little beds of sand; their shadows were very sharp. Sometimes a sandbed led between two slanting boulders that gave like a gateway onto some plain or plateau bounded by ridges of again the same rock; those places were gray with brush. Immense squawbushes shone iron-gray like tumbleweeds forged in some smithy; they bore no red berries to refresh the Savages; they bore nothing but grayness; the only green things were piñon pines or the straight shaggy trunk-posts of Joshua trees, in whose green brushes crows sat. In sunny places the heat was burning; in the shade it was cold. — Peter could see nothing beautiful there. — Sighing, he proceeded up the Road of Tears, which wound monotonously upward, not steeply but steadily, and the wind gusted colder and the shrubs grew grayer and the Joshua trees smaller, while the way went from bowl to bowl in the rocks. In each bowl the horizon was very close, being bordered on every side by a ridge of the same tan stone, and in each bowl a cross was erected, on which a man hung dying while his guards played dice; and Peter averted his eyes and strode on to the summit, from which he could see many dead black hills below, fretted with shrubs and the silvery trails of flood-washes, and then the far flat plain of bluish enigma, stained by cloud-shadows, upon which the great whore Jerusalem walled herself in to her pleasures, and the plain stretched past Emmaus all the way to the Dead Sea, which was then the color of the sky; and a great dark range of dark blue mountains made the final horizon. But where Peter sat was only reddish dirt with the ant-hollowed flute of a man's thigh-bone sticking out, and flakes of quartz or feldspar, and feeble patches of grass huddled in shrub-shadows; — so all he saw was a great anthill of decay swelling above a world of iniquity, but I am sure it was only because he was not quite high enough; had the guards considerately raised him up to the fork of a Joshua tree and nailed him thereon, he might have seen what CHRIST saw: the lovely cacti, over which the delirious CHRIST murmured and waved His hand as He blessed them (but of course His hand was nailed fast to that cross of gray splintered ironwood, so that to those watching below it seemed only that He struggled feebly for a moment, tearing His wounds a little more so that another trickle of weary black blood ran down between the hard-baked clots already on him), and He smiled at the gardens of cholla cactus which only He saw, loving them for their spines, which were as intricately whorled as rose coral; he smiled upon their greenish-orange fruits, which were like hard raspberries; He sent His affection to them on account of the beautiful green they glowed beneath the gray bushes where woodrats lived; in His greater self, which was never maimed or fettered, He kissed the hale gray buckhorn chollas; He embraced the strawberry stems of calico cacti; He smiled in such delight to the rustling leaf-music of the creosote bushes, whose waxy leaves, though olive-green and soothing like stream-plants, were nonetheless almost as sharp-edged as those cholla spines which shimmered silvery and lavender like delicate down upon their lobes and joints, which twined caressingly about each other in that dry sand and they seemed softer than hare-fur until you got closer to them and saw that each joint was like a sea-urchin and their shimmering was a shimmering of barbed spines (but cactus wrens could nest in the chollas, and the Cahuilla Indians could gather and eat the cholla-fruit); so CHRIST married the fuzzy-soft chollas, and he took to himself the detached chollas lying in the sand like fallen gray stars; and He married the pencil-chollas, whose pale green cylindrical leaves were rolled tight like promises; they too were spine-studded, but every spine was precious, and so emerged from a diamond on the leaf; He resurrected the dead gray-white cholla skeletons that decay had reduced to hollow wind-tubes; nor did He neglect the others, the jojoba and the desert senna, the ocotillo, which rose, woody, split, and spined like fish backbones, to a height of fifteen feet or more, like the upright of His cross, and its gray wood was cracked and helically green-veined; but it glowed with orange cactus-flowers. .
