"One thing that struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it."
"These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above the another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock."
"The Bishop and his Vicar were riding through the rain in the Truchas mountains. " "The sky was very low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead -rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens."
"On every side lay ridges covered with blue-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbones of the mountains."
"The desert, the mountains and mesas, were continually re-formed and re-coloured by the cloud shadows. The whole country seemed fluid to the eye under this constant change of accent, this ever-varying distribution of light."
"The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave."
"From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals."
"The sandy soil of the plain had a light sprinkling of junipers, and was splotched with masses of blooming rabbit brush, -that olive-coloured plant that grows in high waves like at a tossing sea, at this season covered with a thatch of bloom, yellow as gorse, or orange like marigolds."