When Thurstane, turning his back on the torture scene, had ascended to the roof of the Casa, he found the ladies excited and anxious.
"What is the matter?" asked Clara at once, taking hold of his sleeve with the tips of her fingers, in a caressing, appealing way, which was common with her when talking to those she liked.
Ordinarily our officer was a truth-teller; indeed, there was nothing which came more awkwardly to him than deception; he hated and despised it as if it were a personage, a criminal, an Indian. But here was a case where he must stoop to falsification, or at least to concealment.
"The Apaches are just below," he mumbled. "Not one of you women must venture out. I will see to everything. Be good now."
She gave his sleeve a little twitch, smiled confidingly in his face, and sat down to do some much-needed mending.
Having posted Sweeny at the foot of the ladders, with instructions to let none of the women descend, Thurstane hastened back to the exterior wall, drawn by a horrible fascination. With his field-glass he could distinguish every action of the tragedy which was being enacted on the plain. Pepita, entirely stripped of her clothing, was already bound to the sapling which stood by the side of the rivulet, and twenty or thirty of the Apaches were dancing around her in a circle, each one approaching her in turn, howling in her ears and spitting in her face. The young man had read and heard much of the horrors of that torture-dance, which stamps the American Indian as the most ferocious of savages; but be had not understood at all how large a part insult plays in this ceremony of deliberate cruelty; and, insulting a woman! he had not once dream'ed it. Now, when he saw it done, his blood rushed into his head and he burst forth in choked incoherent curses.
"I can't stand this," he shouted, advancing upon Coronado with clenched fists. "We must charge."
The Mexican shook his head in a sickly, scared way, and pointed to the left. There was a covering party of fifty or sixty warriors; it was not more than a quarter of a mile from the eastern end of the enclosure; it was in position to charge either upon that, or upon the flank of any rescuing sally.
"We can do it," insisted the lieutenant, who felt as if he could fight twenty men.
"We can't," replied Coronado. "I won't go, and my men shan't go."
Thurstane thought of Clara, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed aloud. Texas Smith stared at him with a kind of contemptuous pity, and offered such consolation as it was in his nature to give.
"Capm, when they've got through this job they'll travel."
The hideous prelude continued for half an hour. The Apaches in the dance were relieved by their comrades in the covering party, who came one by one to take their turns in the round of prancing, hooting, and spitting. Then came a few minutes of rest; then insult was followed by outrage.
The girl was loosed from the sapling and lifted until her head was even with the lower branches, three warriors holding her while two others extended her arms and fixed them to two stout limbs. What the fastenings were Thurstane could guess from the fact that he saw blows given, and heard the long shrill scream of a woman in uttermost agony. Then there was more hammering around the sufferer's feet, and more shrill wailing. She was spiked through the palms and the ankles to the tree. It was a crucifixion.
"By ——!" groaned Thurstane, "I never will spare an Indian as long as I live."
"Capm, I'm with you," said Texas Smith. "I seen my mother fixed like that. I seen it from the bush whar I was a hidin'. I was a boy then. I've killed every Injun I could sence."
Now the dance was resumed. The Apaches pranced about their victim to the music of her screams. The movement quickened; at last they ran around the tree in a maddened crowd; at every shriek they stamped, gestured, and yelled demoniacally. Now and then one of them climbed the girl's body and appeared to stuff something into her mouth. Then the lamentable outcries sank to a gasping and sobbing which could only be imagined by the spectators on the hill.
"Can't you hit some of them?" Thurstane asked Texas Smith.
"Better let 'em finish," muttered the borderer. "The gal can't be helped. She's as good as dead, Capm."
After another rest came a fresh scene of horror. Several of the Apaches, no doubt chiefs or leading braves, caught up their bows and renewed the dance. Running in a circle at full speed about the tree, each one in turn let fly an arrow at the victim, the object being to send the missile clear through her.
"That's the wind-up," muttered Texas Smith. "It's my turn now."
He leaped from the wall to the ground, ran sixty or eighty yards down the hill, halted, aimed, and fired. One of the warriors, a fellow in a red shirt who had been conspicuous in the torture scene, rolled over and lay quiet. The Apaches, who had been completely absorbed by their frantic ceremony, and who had not looked for an attack at the moment, nor expected death at such a distance, uttered a cry of surprise and dismay. There was a scramble of ten or fifteen screaming horsemen after the audacious borderer. But immediately on firing he had commenced a rapid retreat, at the same time reloading. He turned and presented his rifle; just then, too, a protecting volley burst from the rampart; another Apache fell, and the rest retreated.
"Capm, it's all right," said Texas, as he reascended the ruin. "We're squar with 'em."
"We might have broken it up," returned Thurstane sullenly.
"No, Capm. You don't know 'em. They'd got thar noses p'inted to torture that gal. If they didn't do it thar, they'd a done it a little furder off. They was bound to do it. Now it's done, they'll travel."
Warned by their last misadventure, the Indians presently retired to their usual camping ground, leaving their victim attached to the sapling.
"I'll fotch her up," volunteered Texas, who had a hyena's hankering after dead bodies. "Reckon you'd like to bury her."
He mounted, rode slowly, and with prudent glances to right and left, down the hill, halted under the tree, stood up in his saddle and worked there for some minutes. The Apaches looked on from a distance, uttering yells of exultation and making opprobrious gestures. Presently Texas resumed his seat and cantered gently back to the ruins, bearing across his saddle-bow a fearful burden, the naked body of a girl of eighteen, pierced with more than fifty arrows, stained and streaked all over with blood, the limbs shockingly mangled, and the mouth stuffed with rags.
While nearly every other spectator turned away in horror, he glared steadily and calmly at the corpse, repeating, "That's Injin fun, that is. That's what they brag on, that is."
"Bury her outside the wall," ordered Thurstane with averted face. "And listen, all you people, not a word of this to the women."
"We shall be catechised," said Coronado.
"You must do the lying," replied the officer. He was so shaken by what he had witnessed that he did not dare to face Clara for an hour afterward, lest his discomposure should arouse her suspicions. When he did at last visit the tower, she was quiet and smiling, for Coronado had done his lying, and done it well.
"So there was no attack," she said. "I am so glad!"
"Only a little skirmish. You heard the firing, of course."
"Yes. Coronado told us about it. What a horrible howling the Indians made! There were some screams that were really frightful."
"It was their last demonstration. They will probably be gone in the morning."
"Poor Pepita! She will be carried off," said Clara, a tear or two stealing down her cheek.
"Yes, poor Pepita!" sighed Thurstane.
The muleteer who had been killed in the assault was already buried. At sundown came the funeral of the soldier Shubert. The body, wrapped in a blanket, was borne by four Mexicans to the grave which had been prepared for it, followed by his three comrades with loaded muskets, and then by all the other members of the party, except Mrs. Stanley, who looked down from her roof upon the spectacle. Thurstane acted as chaplain, and read the funeral service from Clara's prayer-book, amidst the weeping of women and the silence of men. The dead young hero was lowered into his last resting-place. Sergeant Meyer gave the order: "Shoulder arms—ready—present—aim—fire!" The ceremony was ended; the muleteers filled the grave; a stone was placed to mark it; so slept a good soldier.
Now came another night of anxiety, but also of quiet. In the morning, when eager eyes looked through the yellow haze of dawn over the plain, not an Apache was to be seen.
"They are gone," said Coronado to Thurstane, after the two had made the tour of the ruins and scrutinized every feature of the landscape. "What next?"
Thurstane swept his field-glass around once more, searching for some outlet besides the horrible cañon, and searching in vain.
"We must wait a day or so for our wounded," he said. "Then we must start back on our old trail. I don't see anything else before us."
"It is a gloomy prospect," muttered Coronado, thinking of the hundred miles of rocky desert, and of the possibility that Apaches might be ambushed at the end of it.
He had been so anxious about himself for a few days that he had cared for little else. He had been humble, submissive to Thurstane, and almost entirely indifferent about Clara.
"We ought at least to try something in the way of explorations," continued the lieutenant. "To begin with, I shall sound the river. I shall be thought a devil of a failure if I don't carry back some information about the topography of this region."
"Can you paddle your boat against the current?" asked Coronado.
"I doubt it. But we can make a towing cord of lariats and let it out from the shore; perhaps swing it clear across the river in that way—with some paddling, you know."
"It is an excellent plan," said Coronado.
The day passed without movement, excepting that Texas Smith and two Mexicans explored the cañon for several miles, returning with a couple of lame ponies and a report that the Apaches had undoubtedly gone southward. At night, however, the animals were housed and sentries posted as usual, for Thurstane feared lest the enemy might yet return and attempt a surprise.
The next morning, all being quiet, the Buchanan boat was launched. A couple of fairish paddles were chipped out of bits of driftwood, and a towline a hundred feet long was made of lariats. Thurstane further provisioned the cockle-shell with fishing tackle, a sounding line, his own rifle, Shubert's musket and accoutrements, a bag of hard bread, and a few pounds of jerked beef.
"You are not going to make a voyage!" stared Coronado.
"I am preparing for accidents. We may get carried down the river."
"I thought you proposed to keep fast to the shore."
"I do. But the lariats may break."
Coronado said no more. He lighted a cigarito and looked on with an air of dreamy indifference. He had hit upon a plan for getting rid of Thurstane.
The next question was, who could handle a boat? The lieutenant wanted two men to keep it out in the current while he used the sounding line and recorded results.
"Guess I'll do 's well 's the nex' hand," volunteered Captain Glover. "Got a sore ear, 'n' a hole in my nose, but reckon I'm 'n able-bodied seaman for all that.Hevrowed some in my time. Rowed forty mile after a whale onct, 'n' caught the critter—fairly rowed him down. Current's putty lively. Sh'd say 't was tearin' off 'bout five knots an hour. But guess I'll try it. Sh'd kinder like to feel water under me agin."
"Captain, you shall handle the ship," smiled Thurstane. "I'll mention you by name in my report. Who next?"
"Me," yelped Sweeny.
"Can you row, Sweeny?"
"I can, Liftinant."
"You may try it."
"Can I take me gun, Liftinant?" demanded Sweeny, who was extravagantly fond and proud of his piece, all the more perhaps because he held it in awe.
"Yes, you can take it, and Glover can have Shubert's. Though, 'pon my honor, I don't know why we should carry firearms. It's old habit, I suppose. It's a way we have in the army."
The lieutenant had no sort of anxiety on the score of his enterprise. His plan was to swing out into the current, and, if the boat proved perfectly manageable, to cut loose from the towline and paddle across, sounding the whole breadth of the channel. It seemed easy enough and safe enough. When he left the Casa Grande after breakfast he contrived to kiss Clara's hand, but it did not once occur to him that it would be proper to bid her farewell. He was very far indeed from guessing that in the knot of the lariat which was fast to the bow of his coracle there was a fatal gash. It was not suspicion of evil, but merely a habit of precaution, a prudential tone of mind which he had acquired in service, that led him at the last moment to say (making Coronado tremble in his boots), "Mr. Glover, have you thoroughly overhauled the cord?"
"Give her a look jest before we went up to breakfast," replied the skipper. "She'll hold."
Coronado, who stood three feet distant, blew a quiet little whiff of smoke through his thin purple lips, meanwhile dreamily contemplating the speaker.
"Git in, you paddywhack," said Glover to Sweeny. "Grab yer paddle. T'other end; that's the talk. Now then. All aboard that's goin'. Shove off."
In a few seconds, impelled from the shore by the paddles, the boat was at the full length of the towline and in the middle of the boiling current.
"Will it never break?" thought Coronado, smoking a little faster than usual, but not moving a muscle.
Yes. It had already broken. At the first pause in the paddling the mangled lariat had given way.
In spite of the renewed efforts of the oarsmen, the boat was flying down the San Juan.
When Thurstane perceived that the towline had parted and that the boat was gliding down the San Juan, he called sharply, "Paddle!"
He was in no alarm as yet. The line, although of rawhide, was switching on the surface of the rapid current; it seemed easy enough to recover it and make a new fastening. Passing from the stern to the bow, he knelt down and dipped one hand in the water, ready to clutch the end of the lariat.
But a boat five feet long and twelve feet broad, especially when made of canvas on a frame of light sticks, is not handily paddled against swift water; and the Buchanan (as the voyagers afterward named it) not only sagged awkwardly, but showed a strong tendency to whirl around like an egg-shell as it was. Moreover, the loose line almost instantly took the direction of the stream, and swept so rapidly shoreward that by the time Thurstane was in position to seize it, it was rods away.
"Row for the bank," he ordered. But just as he spoke there came a little noise which was to these three men the crack of doom. The paddle of that most unskilful navigator, Sweeny, snapped in two, and the broad blade of it was instantly out of reach. Next the cockle-shell of a boat was spinning on its keel-less bottom, and whirling broadside on, bow foremost, stern foremost, any way, down the San Juan.
"Paddle away!" shouted Thurstane to Glover. "Drive her in shore! Pitch her in!"
The old coaster sent a quick, anxious look down the river, and saw at once that there was no chance of reaching the bank. Below them, not three hundred yards distant, was an archipelago of rocks, thedébrisof fallen precipices and pinnacles, through which, for half a mile or more, the water flew in whirlpools and foam. They were drifting at great speed toward this frightful rapid, and, if they entered it, destruction was sure and instant. Only the middle of the stream showed a smooth current; and there was less than half a minute in which to reach it. Without a word Glover commenced paddling as well as he could away from the bank.
"What are you about?" yelled Thurstane, who saw Clara on the roof of the Casa Grande, and was crazed at the thought of leaving her there. She would suspect that he had abandoned her; she would be massacred by the Apaches; she would starve in the desert, etc.
Glover made no reply. His whole being was engaged in the struggle of evading immediate death.
One more glance, one moment of manly, soldierly reflection, enabled Thurstane to comprehend the fate which was upon him, and to bow to it with resignation. Turning his back upon the foaming reefs which might the next instant be his executioners, he stood up in the boat, took off his cap, and waved a farewell to Clara. He was so unconscious of anything but her and his parting from her that for some time he did not notice that the slight craft had narrowly shaved the rocks, that it had barely crawled into the middle current, and that he was temporarily safe. He kept his eyes fixed upon the Casa and upon the girl's motionless figure until a monstrous, sullen precipice slid in between. He was like one who breathes his last with straining gaze settled on some loved face, parting from which is worse than death. When he could see her no longer, nor the ruin which sheltered her, and which suddenly seemed to him a paradise, he dropped his head between his hands, utterly unmanned.
"'Twon't dew to give it up while we float, Major," said Glover, breveting the lieutenant by way of cheering him.
"I don't give it up," replied Thurstane; "but I had a duty to do there, and now I can't do it."
"There's dooties to be 'tended to here, I reckon," suggested Glover.
"They will be done," said the officer, raising his head and settling his face. "How can we help you?"
"Don't seem to need much help. The river doos the paddlin'; wish it didn't. No 'casion to send anybody aloft. I'll take a seat in the stern 'n' mind the hellum. Guess that's all they is to be done."
"You dum paddywhack," he presently reopened, "what d'ye break yer paddle for?"
"I didn't break it," yapped Sweeny indignantly. "It broke itself."
"Well, what d'ye say y' could paddle for, when y' couldn't?"
"I can paddle. I paddled as long as I had anythin' but a sthick."
"Oh, you dum landlubber!" smirked Glover. "What if I should order ye to the masthead?"
"I wouldn't go," asseverated Sweeny. "I'll moind no man who isn't me suparior officer. I've moindin' enough to do in the arrmy. I wouldn't go, onless the liftinint towld me. Thin I'd go."
"Guess y' wouldn't now."
"Yis I wud."
"But they an't no mast."
"I mane if there was one."
This kind of babble Glover kept up for some minutes, with the sole object of amusing and cheering Thurstane, whose extreme depression surprised and alarmed him. He knew that the situation was bad, and that it would take lots of pluck to bring them through it.
"Capm, where d'ye think we're bound?" he presently inquired. "Whereabouts doos this river come out?"
"It runs into the Colorado of the West, and that runs into the head of the Gulf of California."
"Californy! Reckon I'll git to the diggins quicker 'n I expected. Goin' at this rate, we'll make about a hundred 'n' twenty knots a day. What's the distance to Californy?"
"By the bends of the river it can't be less than twelve hundred miles to the gulf."
"Whew!" went Glover. "Ten days' sailin'. Wal, smooth water all the way?"
"The San Juan has never been navigated. So far as I know, we are the first persons who ever launched a boat on it."
"Whew! Why, it's like discoverin' Ameriky. Wal, what d'ye guess about the water? Any chance 'f its bein' smooth clear through?"
"The descent to the gulf must be two or three thousand feet, perhaps more. We can hardly fail to find rapids. I shouldn't be astonished by a cataract."
Glover gave a long whistle and fell into grave meditation. His conclusion was: "Can't navigate nights, that's a fact. Have to come to anchor. That makes twenty days on't. Wal, Capm, fust thing is to fish up a bit 'f driftwood 'n' whittle out 'nother paddle. Want a boat-pole, too, like thunder. We're awful short 'f spars for a long voyage."
His lively mind had hardly dismissed this subject before he remarked: "Dum cur'ous that towline breaking. I overhauled every foot on't. I'd a bet my bottom fo'pence on its drawin' ten ton. Haul in the slack end 'n' let's hev a peek at it."
The tip of the lariat, which was still attached to the boat, being handed to him, he examined it minutely, closed his eyes, whistled, and ejaculated, "Sawed!"
"What?" asked Thurstane.
"Sawed," repeated Glover. "That leather was haggled in tew with a jagged knife or a sharp flint or suthin 'f that sort. Done a purpose, 's sure 's I'm a sinner."
Thurstane took the lariat, inspected the breakage carefully, and scowled with helpless rage.
"That infernal Texan!" he muttered.
"Sho!" said Glover. "That feller? Anythin' agin ye? Wal, Capm, then all I've got to say is, you come off easy. That feller 'd cut a sleepin' man's throat. I sh'd say thank God for the riddance. Tell ye I've watched that cuss. Been blastedly afeard 'f him. Hev so, by George! The further I git from him the safer I feel."
"Not a nice man to leavethere" muttered Thurstane, whose anxiety was precisely not for himself, but for Clara. The young fellow could not be got to talk much; he was a good deal upset by his calamity. The parting from Clara was an awful blow; the thought of her dangers made him feel as if he could jump overboard; and, lurking deep in his soul, there was an ugly fear that Coronado might now win her. He was furious moreover at having been tricked, and meditated bedlamite plans of vengeance. For a time he stared more at the mangled lariat than at the amazing scenery through which he was gliding.
And yet that scenery, although only a prelude, only an overture to the transcendent oratorios of landscape which were to follow, was in itself a horribly sublime creation. Not twenty minutes after the snapping of the towline the boat had entered one of those stupendous cañons which form the distinguishing characteristic of the great American table-land, and make it a region unlike any other in the world.
Remember that the cañon is a groove chiselled out of rock by a river. Although a groove, it is never straight for long distances. The river at its birth was necessarily guided by the hollows of the primal plateau; moreover, it was tempted to labor along the softest surfaces. Thus the cañon is a sinuous gully, cut down from the hollows of rocky valleys, and following their courses of descent from mountain-chain toward ocean.
In these channels the waters have chafed, ground, abraded, eroded for centuries which man cannot number. Like the Afreets of the Arabian Nights, they have been mighty slaves, subject to a far mightier master. That potent magician whose lair is in the centre of the earth, and whom men have vaguely styled the attraction of gravitation, has summoned them incessantly toward himself. In their struggle to render him obedience, they have accomplished results which make all the works of man insignificant by comparison.
To begin with, vast lakes, which once swept westward from the bases of the Rocky Mountains, were emptied into the Pacific. Next the draining currents transformed into rivers, cut their way through the soil which formerly covered the table-lands and commenced their attrition upon the underlying continent of sandstone. It was a grinding which never ceased; every pebble and every bowlder which lay in the way was pressed into the endless labor; mountains were used up in channelling mountains.
The central magician was insatiable and pitiless; he demanded not only the waters, but whatever they could bring; he hungered after the earth and all that covered it. His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by year into the cañons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery. Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert.
Then the minor Afreets perished of the results of their own obedience. There being no soil, the fountains disappeared; there being no evaporation, the rains diminished. Deprived of sustenance, nearly all the shorter streams dried up, and the channels which they had hewn became arid gullies. Only those rivers continued to exist which drew their waters from the snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains or from the spurs and ranges which intersect the plateaux. The ages may come when these also will cease to flow, and throughout all this portion of the continent the central magician will call for his Afreets in vain.
For some time we must attend much to the scenery of the desert thus created. It has become one of the individuals of our story, and interferes with the fate of the merely human personages. Thurstane could not long ignore its magnificent, oppressive, and potent presence. Forgetting somewhat his anxieties about the loved one whom he had left behind, he looked about him with some such amazement as if he had been translated from earth into regions of supernature.
The cañon through which he was flying was a groove cut in solid sandstone, less than two hundred feet wide, with precipitous walls of fifteen hundred feet, from the summit of which the rock sloped away into buttes and peaks a thousand feet higher. On every side the horizon was half a mile above his head. He was in a chasm, twenty-five hundred feet below the average surface of the earth, the floor of which was a swift river.
He seemed to himself to be traversing the abodes of the Genii. Although he had only heard of "Vathek," he thought of the Hall of Eblis. It was such an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Doré in his picturings of Dante's "Inferno." Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits. The shadow, the aridity, the barrenness, the solemnity, the pitilessness, the horrid cruelty of the scene, were more than might be received into the soul. It was something which could not be imagined, and which when seen could not be fully remembered. To gaze on it was like beholding the mysterious, wicked countenance of the father of all evil. It was a landscape which was a fiend.
The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious: a hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush.
The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous. There were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in length. There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter of a mile in height. Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations. In consequence of the varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a series of innumerable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of combats. There had been interminable strife here between the demons of earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies. It was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the mausoleum of the forces of nature.
At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had perished long ago, opened into the main cañon. In passing these the voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed like the handiwork of that "anarch old," who wrought before the shaping of the universe. One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone one-third of a mile in depth. It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness. The stillness, the absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language.
Another gorge was a ruin. The rock here being of various degrees of density, the waters had essayed a thousand channels. All the softer veins had been scooped out and washed away, leaving the harder blocks and masses piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look and pass on."
At one point two lateral cañons opened side by side upon the San Juan. The partition was a stupendous pile of rock fifteen hundred feet in altitude, but so narrow that it seemed to the voyagers below like the single standing wall of some ruined edifice. Although the space on its summit was broad enough for a cathedral, it did not appear to them that it would afford footing to a man, while the enclosing fissures looked narrow enough to be crossed at a bound. On either side of this isolated bar of sandstone a plumb-line might have been dropped straight to the level of the river. The two chasms were tombs of shadow, where nothing ever stirred but winds.
The solitude of this continuous panorama of precipices was remarkable. It was a region without man, or beast, or bird, or insect. The endless rocks, not only denuded, but eroded and scraped by the action of bygone waters, could furnish no support for animal life. A beast of prey, or even a mountain goat, would have starved here. Could a condor of the Andes have visited it, he would have spread his wings at once to leave it.
Yet horrible as the scene was, it was so sublime that it fascinated. For hours, gazing at lofty masses, vast outlines, prodigious assemblages of rocky imagery, endless strokes of natural frescoing, the three adventurers either exchanged rare words of astonishment, or lay in reveries which transported them beyond earth. What Thurstane felt he could only express by recalling random lines of the "Paradise Lost." It seemed to him as if they might at any moment emerge upon the lake of burning marl, and float into the shadow of the walls of Pandemonium. He would not have felt himself carried much beyond his present circumstances, had he suddenly beheld Satan,
High on a throne of royal state, which farOutshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.
He was roused from his dreams by the quick, dry, grasshopper-like voice of Phineas Glover, asking, "What's that?"
A deep whisper came up the chasm. They could hardly distinguish it when they stretched their hearing to the utmost. It seemed to steal with difficulty against the rushing flood, and then to be swept down again. It sighed threateningly for a moment, and instantaneously became silence. One might liken it to a ghost trying to advance through some castle hall, only to be borne backward by the fitful night-breeze, or by some mysterious ban. Was the desert inhabited, and by disembodied demons?
After a further flight of half a mile, this variable sigh changed to a continuous murmur. There was now before the voyagers a straight course of nearly two miles, at the end of which lay hid the unseen power which gave forth this solemn menace. The river, perfectly clear of rocks, was a sheet of liquid porphyry, an arrow of dark-red water slightly flecked with foam. The walls of the cañon, scarcely fifty yards apart and more stupendous than ever, rose in precipices without a landing-place or a foothold. So far as eye could pierce into the twilight of the sublime chasm, there was not a spot where the boat could be arrested in its flight, or where a swimmer could find a shelf of safety.
"It is a rapid," said Thurstane. "You did well, Captain Glover, to get another paddle."
"Lord bless ye!" returned the skipper impatiently, "it's lucky I was whittlin' while you was thinkin'. If we on'y had a boat-hook!"
From moment to moment the murmur came nearer and grew louder. It was smothered and then redoubled by the reverberations of the cañon, so that sometimes it seemed the tigerish snarl of a rapid, and sometimes the leonine roar of a cataract. A bend of the chasm at last brought the voyagers in sight of the monster, which was frothing and howling to devour them. It was a terrific spectacle. It was like Apollyon "straddling quite across the way," to intercept Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. From one dizzy rampart to the other, and as far down the echoing cavern as eye could reach, the river was white with an arrowy rapid storming though a labyrinth of rocks.
Sweeny, evidently praying, moved his lips in silence. Glover's face had the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and Thurstane's the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried to his utmost by cannonade.
The three adventurers were entering the gorge of an impassable rapid.
Here had once been the barrier of a cataract; the waters had ground through it, tumbled it down, and gnawed it to tatters; the scattered bowlders which showed through the foam were the remnants of the Cyclopean feast.
There appeared to be no escape from death. Any one of those stones would rend the canvas boat from end to end, or double it into a wet rug; and if a swimmer should perchance reach the bank, he would drown there, looking up at precipices; or, if he should find a footing, it would only be to starve.
"There is our chance," said Thurstane, pointing to a bowlder as large as a house which stood under the northern wall of the cañon, about a quarter of a mile above the first yeast of the rapid.
He and Glover each took a paddle. They had but one object: it was to get under the lee of the bowlder, and so stop their descent; after that they would see what more could be done. Danger and safety were alike swift here; it was a hurry as of battle or tempest Almost before they began to hope for success, they were circling in the narrow eddy, very nearly a whirlpool, which wheeled just below the isolated rock. Even here the utmost caution was necessary, for while the Buchanan was as light as a bubble, it was also as fragile.
Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying what next?
"I wish I was on an iceberg," said Glover in his despair.
"An' I wish I was in Oirland," added Sweeny. "But if the divil himself was to want to desart here, he couldn't."
Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should she escape her own perils. Through his field-glass he surveyed the whole gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain. It was as impossible to descend the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the cañon. He had just heard Sweeny say, "I wish I was bein' murthered by thim naygurs," and had smiled at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope dawned upon him.
Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of the precipice. The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was evidently softer than the general mass; and in other days (centuries ago), when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply eroded. This erosion had been carried along the cañon on an even line of altitude as far as the softer layer extended. Thurstane could trace it with his glass for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid. The groove was everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or so to nearly a rod.
Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle. The only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers would come to a jumping-off place. How high would it be? Could they get down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation? Well, they must try it; there was no other road. With one eloquent wave of his hand Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.
"Hurray!" shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.
"Can we make the jump at the other end?" asked the lieutenant.
"Reckon so," chirruped Glover. "Look a here."
He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a mass of strips of fresh hide.
"Hoss skin," he explained. "Peeled off a mustang. Borrowed it from that Texan cuss. Thought likely we might want to splice our towline. 'Bout ten fathom, I reckon; 'n' there's the lariat, two fathom more. All we've got to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, 'n' travel."
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when they commenced their preparations for making this extraordinary portage. Sunk as they were twenty-five hundred feet in the bowels of the earth, the sun had already set for them; but they were still favored with a sort of twilight radiance, and they could count upon it for a couple of hours longer. Carefully the guns, paddles, and stores were landed on the marvellous causeway; and then, with still greater caution, the boat was lifted to the same support and taken to pieces. The whole mass of material, some two hundred pounds in weight, was divided into three portions. Each shouldered his pack, and the strange journey commenced.
"Sweeny, don't you fall off," said Glover. "We can't spare them sticks."
"If I fall off, ye may shute me where I stand," returned Sweeny. "I know better'n to get drowned and starved to death in wan. I can take care av meself. I've sailed this a way many a time in th' ould counthry."
The road was a smooth and easy one, barring a few cumbering bowlders. To the left and below was the river, roaring, hissing, and foaming through itschevaux-de-friseof rocks. In front the cañon stretched on and on until its walls grew dim with shadow and distance. Above were overhanging precipices and a blue streak of sunlit sky.
It was quite dusk with the wanderers before they reached a point where the San Juan once more flowed with an undisturbed current.
"We can't launch by this light," said Thurstane. "We will sleep here."
"It'll be a longish night," commented Glover. "But don't see's we can shorten it by growlin'. When fellahs travel in the bowels 'f th' earth, they've got to follow the customs 'f th' country. Puts me in mind of Jonah in the whale's belly. Putty short tacks, Capm. Nine hours a day won't git us along; any too fast. But can't help it. Night travellin' ain't suited to our boat. Suthin' like a bladder football: one pin-prick 'd cowallapse it. Wal, so we'll settle. Lucky we wanted our blankets to set on. 'Pears to me this rock's a leetle harder'n a common deck plank. Unroll the boat, Capm? Wal, guess we'd better. Needs dryin'a speck. Too much soakin' an't good for canvas. Better dry it out, 'n' fold it up, 'n' sleep on't. This passageway that we're in, sh'd say at might git up a smart draught. What d'ye say to this spot for campin'? Twenty foot breadth of beam here. Kind of a stateroom, or bridal chamber. No need of fallin' out. Ever walk in yer sleep, Sweeny? Better cut it right square off to-night. Five fathom down to the river, sh'd say. Splash ye awfully, Sweeny."
Thus did Captain Glover prattle in his cheerful way while the party made its preparations for the night.
They were like ants lodged in some transverse crack of a lofty wall. They were in a deep cut of the shelf, with fifteen hundred or two thousand feet of sandstone above, and the porphyry-colored river thirty feet below. The narrow strip of sky far above their heads was darkening rapidly with the approach of night, and with an accumulation of clouds. All of a sudden there was a descent of muddy water, charged with particles of red earth and powdered sandstone, pouring by them down the overhanging precipice.
"Liftinant!" exclaimed Sweeny, "thim naygurs up there is washin' their dirty hides an' pourin' the suds down on us."
"It's the rain, Sweeny. There's a shower on the plateau above."
"The rain, is it? Thin all nate people in that counthry must stand in great nade of ombrellys."
The scene was more marvellous than ever. Not a drop of rain fell in the river; the immense façade opposite them was as dry as a skull; yet here was this muddy cataract. It fell for half an hour, scarcely so much as spattering them in their recess, but plunging over them into the torrent beneath. By the time it ceased they had eaten their supper of hard bread and harder beef, and lighted their pipes to allay their thirst. There was a laying of plans to regain the river to-morrow, a grave calculation as to how long their provisions would last, and in general much talk about their chances.
"Not a shine of a lookout for gittin' back to the Casa?" queried Captain Glover. "Knowed it," he added, when the lieutenant sadly shook his head. "Fool for talkin' 'bout it. How 'bout reachin' the trail to the Moqui country?"
"I have been thinking of it all day," said Thurstane. "We must give it up. Every one of the branch cañons on the other bank trends wrong. We couldn't cross them; we should have to follow them; it's an impassable hell of a country. We might by bare chance reach the Moqui pueblos; but the probability is that we should die in the desert of thirst. We shall have to run the river. Perhaps we shall have to run the Colorado too. If so, we had better keep on to Diamond creek, and from there push by land to Cactus Pass. Cactus Pass is on the trail, and we may meet emigrants there. I don't know what better to suggest."
"Dessay it's a tiptop idee," assented Glover cheeringly. "Anyhow, if we take on down the river, it seems like follyin' the guidings of Providence."
In spite of their strange situation and doubtful prospects, the three adventurers slept early and soundly. When they awoke it was daybreak, and after chewing the hardest, dryest, and rawest of breakfasts, they began their preparations to reach the river. To effect this, it was necessary to find a cleft in the ledge where they could fasten a cord securely, and below it a footing at the water's edge where they could put their boat together and launch it. It would not do to go far down the cañon, for the bed of the stream descended while the shelf retained its level, and the distance between them was already sufficiently alarming. After an anxious search they discovered a bowlder lying in the river beneath the shelf, with a flat surface perfectly suited to their purpose. There, too, was a cleft, but a miserably small one.
"We can't jam a cord in that," said Glover; "nor the handle of a paddle nuther."
"It'll howld me bagonet," suggested Sweeny.
"It can be made to hold it," decided Thurstane. "We must drill away till it does hold it."
An hour's labor enabled them to insert the bayonet to the handle and wedge it with spikes split off from the precious wood of the paddles. When it seemed firm enough to support a strong lateral pressure, Glover knotted on to it, in his deft sailor fashion, a strip of the horse hide, and added others to that until he had a cord of some forty feet. After testing every inch and every knot, he said: "Who starts first?"
"I will try it," answered Thurstane.
"Lightest first, I reckon," observed Glover.
Sweeny looked at the precipice, skipped about the shelf uneasily, made a struggle with his fears, and asked, "Will ye let me down aisy?"
"Jest 's easy 's rollin' off a log."
"That's aisy enough. It's the lightin' that's har-rd. If it comes to rowlin' down, I'll let ye have the first rowl. I've no moind to git ahead of me betthers."
"Try it, my lad," said Thurstane. "The real danger comes with the last man. He will have to trust to the bayonet alone."
"An' what'll I do whirl I get down there?"
"Take the traps off the cord as we send them down, and pile them on the rock."
"I'm off," said Sweeny, after one more look into the chasm. While the others held the cord to keep the strain from coming on the bayonet, he gripped it with both hands, edged stern foremost over the precipice, and slipped rapidly to the bowlder, whence he sent up a hoot of exultation. The cord was drawn back; the boat was made up in two bundles, which were lowered in succession; then the provisions, paddles, arms, etc. Now came the question whether Thurstane or Glover should remain last on the ledge.
"Lightest last," said the lean skipper. "Stands to reason."
"It's my duty to take the hot end of the poker," replied the officer. "Loser goes first," said Glover, producing a copper. "Heads or tails?"
"Heads," guessed Thurstane.
"It's a tail. Catch hold, Capm. Slow 'n' easy till you get over."
The cord holding firm, Thurstane reached the bowlder, and was presently joined by Glover.
"Liftinant, I want me bagonet," cried Sweeny. "Will I go up afther it?"
"How the dickens 'd you git down again?" asked Glover. "Guess you'll have to leave your bayonet where it sticks. But, Capm, we want that line. Can't you shute it away, clost by th' edge?"
The third shot was a lucky one, and brought down the precious cord. Then came the work of putting the boat into shape, launching it, getting in the stores, and lastly the voyagers.
"Tight's a drum yit," observed Glover, surveying the coracle admiringly. "Fust time I ever sailedoncanvas. Great notion. Don't draw more'n three inches. Might sail acrost country with it. Capm, it's the only boat ever invented that could git down this blasted river."
Glover and Sweeny, two of the most talkative creatures on earth, chattered much to each other. Thurstane sometimes listened to them, sometimes lost himself in reveries about Clara, sometimes surveyed the scenery of the cañon.
The abyss was always the same, yet with colossal variety: here and there yawnings of veined precipices, followed by cavernous closings of the awful sides; breakings in of subsidiary cañons, some narrow clefts, and others gaping shattered mouths; the walls now presenting long lines of rampart, and now a succession of peaks. But still, although they had now traversed the chasm for seventy or eighty miles, they found no close and no declension to its solemn grandeur.
At last came another menace, a murmur deeper and hoarser than that of the rapid, steadily swelling as they advanced until it was a continuous thunder. This time there could be no doubt that they were entering upon a scene of yet undecided battle between the eternal assault of the river and the immemorial resistance of the mountains.
The quickening speed of the waters, and the ceaseless bellow of their charging trumpets as they tore into some yet unseen abyss, announced one of those struggles of nature in which man must be a spectator or a victim.