Where the Walls Stand Up

Polly followed the wash inward and by the middle of the morning she had to admit the raven was right. The walls had stood up. What had been thirty feet at the entrance was now four or five times that, smooth red sandstone rising straight out of the sand with no slope, no ledge, and no polite way for a climber to get started.

Down the face of the cliff ran long dark streaks, almost black, as though someone had poured ink over the rim. Polly flew closer. The streaks were not paint and they were not shadow. They were a thin dark coat left behind by water and dust and tiny living things over an enormous stretch of time. Every rainstorm that ever ran down that wall had signed its name there.

Under a curved overhang she found a city of mud. Cliff swallows had built hundreds of small round nests against the stone, packed shoulder to shoulder, each one with a neat entrance hole. The swallows shot past her in fast tight curves. Ride the wall, one of them called. There is a warm rising wind against this rock all afternoon, and it will carry you for nothing.

So Polly rode the wall. She let the rising air lift her along the red face without a single beat of her wings, and when she looked down the canyon that evening the cliff on the far side stood more than a thousand feet above the sand. It was the same canyon it had been on Monday. It had simply grown up around her.