As Thurstane approached the cataract of the San Juan he thought of the rapids above Niagara, and of the men who had been whirled down them, foreseeing their fate and struggling against it, but unable to escape it.
"We must keep near one wall or the other," he said. "The middle of the river is sure death."
Paddling toward the northern bank, simply because it had saved them in their former peril, they floated like a leaf in the shadows of the precipices, watching for some footway by which to turn the lair of the monster ahead.
The scenery here did not consist exclusively of two lofty ramparts fronting each other. Before the river had established its present channel it had tried the strength of the plateau in various directions, slashing the upper strata into a succession of cañons, which were now lofty and arid gullies, divided from each other by every conceivable form of rocky ruin. Rotundas, amphitheatres, castellated walls, cathedrals of unparalleled immensity, facades of palaces huge enough to be the abodes of the principalities and powers of the air, far-stretching semblances of cities tottering to destruction, all fashions of domes, towers, minarets, spires, and obelisks, with a population of misshapen demons and monsters, looked down from sublime heights upon the voyagers. At every turn in the river the panorama changed, and they beheld new marvels of this Titanic architecture. There was no end to the gigantic and grotesque variety of the commingling outlines. The vastness, the loneliness, the stillness, the twilight sombreness, were awful. And through all reverberated incessantly the defiant clarion of the cataract.
The day was drawing to that early death which it has always had and must always have in these abysses. Knowing how suddenly darkness would fall, and not daring to attempt the unknown without light, the travellers looked for a mooring spot. There was a grim abutment at least eighteen hundred feet high; at its base two rocks, which had tumbled ages ago from the summit, formed a rude breakwater; and on this barrier had collected a bed of coarse pebbles, strewn with driftwood. Here they stopped their flight, unloaded the boat and beached it. The drift-wood furnished them a softer bed than usual, and materials for a fire.
Night supervened with the suddenness of a death which has been looked for, but which is at last a surprise. Shadow after shadow crept down the walls of the chasm, blurred its projections, darkened its faces, and crowded its recesses. The line of sky, seen through the jagged and sinuous opening above, changed slowly to gloom and then to blackness. There was no light in this rocky intestine of the earth except the red flicker of the camp-fire. It fought feebly with the powers of darkness; it sent tremulous despairing flashes athwart the swift ebony river; it reached out with momentary gleams to the nearer facades of precipice; it reeled, drooped, and shuddered as if in hopeless horror. Probably, since the world began, no other fire lighted by man had struggled against the gloom of this tremendous amphitheatre. The darknesses were astonished at it, but they were also uncomprehending and hostile. They refused to be dissipated, and they were victorious.
After two hours a change came upon the scene. The moon rose, filled the upper air with its radiance, and bathed in silver the slopes of the mountains. The narrow belt of visible sky resembled a milky way. The light continued to descend and work miracles. Isolated turrets, domes, and pinnacles came out in gleaming relief against the dark-blue background of the heavens. The opposite crest of the cañon shone with a broad illumination. All the uncouth demons and monsters of the rocks awoke, glaring and blinking, to menace the voyagers in the depths below. The contrast between this supereminent brilliancy and the sullen obscurity of the subterranean river made the latter seem more than ever like Styx or Acheron.
The travellers were awakened in the morning by the trumpetings of the cataract. They embarked and dropped down the stream, hugging the northern rampart and watching anxiously. Presently there was a clear sweep of a mile; the clamor now came straight up to them with redoubled vehemence; a ghost of spray arose and waved threateningly, as if forbidding further passage. It was the roar and smoke of an artillery which had thundered for ages, and would thunder for ages to come. It was a voice and signal which summoned reinforcements of waters, and in obedience to which the waters charged eternally.
The boat had shudders. Every spasm jerked it onward a little faster. It flew with a tremulous speed which was terrible. Thurstane, a good soldier, able to obey as well as to direct, knowing that if Glover could not steer wisely no one could, sat, paddle in hand, awaiting orders. Sweeny fidgeted, looked from one to another, looked at the mist ahead, cringed, wanted to speak, and said nothing. Glover, working hard with his paddle, and just barely keeping the coracle bows on, peered and grinned as if he were facing a hurricane. There was no time to have a care for sunken bowlders, reaching up to rend the thin bottom. The one giant danger of the cataract was enough to fill the mind and bar out every minor terror. Its deafening threats demanded the whole of the imagination. Compared with the probability of plunging down an unknown depth into a boiling hell of waters, all other peril seemed too trifling to attract notice. Such a fate is an enhancement of the horrors of death.
"Liftinant, let's go over with a whoop," called Sweeny. "It's much aisier."
"Keep quiet, my lad," replied the officer. "We must hear orders."
"All right, Liftinant," said Sweeny, relieved by having spoken.
At this moment Glover shouted cheerfully, "We ain't dead yit There's a ledge."
"I see it," nodded Thurstane.
"Where there's a ledge there's an eddy," screamed Glover, raising his voice to pierce the hiss of the rapid and the roar of the cascade.
Below them, jutting out from the precipitous northern bank, was a low bar of rock over which the river did not sweep. It was the remnant of a once lofty barrier; the waters had, as it were, gnawed it to the bone, but they had not destroyed it. In two minutes the voyagers were beside it, paddling with all their strength against the eddy which whirled along its edge toward the cataract, and tossing over the short, spiteful ripples raised by the sudden turn of the current. With a "Hooroo!" Sweeny tumbled ashore, lariat in hand, and struck his army shoes into the crevices of the shattered sandstone. In five minutes more the boat was unloaded and lifted upon the ledge.
The travellers did not go to look at the cataract; their immediate and urgent need was to get by it. Making up their bundles as usual, they commenced a struggle with the intricacies and obstacles of the portage. The eroded, disintegrated plateau descended to the river in a huge confusion of ruin, and they had to pick their way for miles through a labyrinth of cliffs, needles, towers, and bowlders. Reaching the river once more, they found themselves upon a little plain of moderately fertile earth, the first plain and the first earth which they had seen since entering the cañon. The cataract was invisible; a rock cathedral several hundred feet high hid it; they could scarcely discern its lofty ghost of spray.
Two miles away, in the middle of the plain, appeared a ruin of adobe walls, guttered and fissured by the weather. It was undoubtedly a monument of that partially civilized race, Aztec, Toltec, or Moqui, which centuries ago dotted the American desert with cities, and passed away without leaving other record. With his field-glass Thurstane discovered what he judged to be another similar structure crowning a distant butte. They had no time to visit these remains, and they resumed their voyage.
After skirting the plain for several miles, they reëntered the cañon, drifted two hours or more between its solemn walls, and then came out upon a wide sweep of open country. The great cañon of the San Juan had been traversed nearly from end to end in safety. When the adventurers realized their triumph they rose to their feet and gave nine hurrahs.
"It's loike a rich man comin' through the oye av a needle," observed Sweeny.
"Only this haint much the air 'f the New Jerusalem," returned Glover, glancing at the arid waste of buttes and ranges in the distance.
"We oughter look up some huntin'," he continued. "Locker'll begin to show bottom b'fore long. Sweeny, wouldn't you like to kill suthin?"
"I'd like to kill a pig," said Sweeny.
"Wal, guess we'll probably come acrost one. They's a kind of pigs in these deestricks putty nigh's long 's this boat."
"There ain't," returned Sweeny.
"Call 'em grizzlies when they call 'em at all," pursued the sly Glover.
"They may call 'em what they plaze if they won't call 'em as long as this boat."
Fortune so managed things, by way of carrying out Glover's joke, that a huge grizzly just then snowed himself on the bank, some two hundred yards below the boat.
After easily slaughtering one bear, the travellers had a far more interesting season with another, who was allured to the scene by the smell of jerking meat, and who gave them a very lively half hour of it, it being hard to say which was the most hunted, the bruin or the humans.
"Look a' that now!" groaned Sweeny, when the victory had been secured. "The baste has chawed up me gun barrl loike it was a plug o' tobacky."
"Throw it away," ordered Thurstane, after inspecting the twisted and lacerated musket.
Tenderly and tearfully Sweeny laid aside the first gun that he had ever carried, went again and again to look at its mangled form as if it were a dead relative, and in the end raised a little mausoleum of cobble-stones over it.
"If there was any whiskey, I'd give um a wake," he sighed. "I'm a pratty soldier now, without a gun to me back."
"I'll let ye carry mine when we come to foot it," suggested Glover.
"Yis, an' ye may carry me part av the boat," retorted Sweeny.
The bear meat was tough and musky, but it could be eaten, must be eaten, ind was eaten. During the time required for jerking a quantity of it, Glover made a boat out of the two hides, scraping them with a hunting knife, sewing them with a sailor's needle and strands of the sounding-line, and stretching them on a frame of green saplings, the result being a craft six feet long by nearly four broad, and about the shape of a half walnut-shell. The long hair was left on, as a protection against the rocks of the river, and the seams were filled and plastered with bear's grease.
"It's a mighty bad-smellin' thing," remarked Sweeny. "An who's goin' to back it over the portages?"
"Robinson Crusoe!" exclaimed Glover. "I never thought of that. Wal, let's see. Oh, we kin tow her astarn in plain sailin', 'n' when we come to a cataract we can put Sweeny in an' let her slide."
"No ye can't," said Sweeny. "It's big enough, an' yet it won't howld um, no more'n a tayspoon'll howld a flay."
"Wal, we kin let her slide without a crew, 'n' pick her up arterwards," decided Glover.
We must hasten over the minor events of this remarkable journey. The travellers, towing the bearskin boat behind the Buchanan, passed the mouth of Cañon Bonito, and soon afterward beheld the San Juan swallowed up in the Grand River, a far larger stream which rises in the Rocky Mountains east of Utah. They swept by the horrible country of the Utes and Payoches, without holding intercourse with its squalid and savage inhabitants. Here and there, at the foot of some monstrous precipice, in a profound recess surrounded by a frenzy of rocks, they saw hamlets of a few miserable wigwams, with patches of starveling corn and beans. Sharp wild cries, like the calls of malicious brownies, or the shrieks of condemned spirits, were sent after them, without obtaining response.
"They bees only naygurs," observed Sweeny. "Niver moind their blaggard ways."
After the confluence with the Grand River came solitude. The land had been swept and garnished: swept by the waters and garnished with horrors; a land of cañons, plateaux, and ranges, all arid; a land of desolation and the shadow of death. There was nothing on which man or beast could support life; nature's power of renovation was for the time suspended, and seemed extinct. It was a desert which nothing could restore to fruitfulness except the slow mysterious forces of a geologic revolution.
Beyond the Sierra de Lanterna the Grand River was joined by the Green River, streaming down through gullied plateaux from the deserts of Utah and the mountains which tower between Oregon and Nebraska. Henceforward, still locked in Titanic defiles or flanked by Cyclopeandébris, they were on the Colorado of the West.
Thurstane meditated as to what course he should follow. Should he strike southward by land for the Bernalillo trail, risking a march through a wide, rocky, lifeless, and perhaps waterless wilderness? Or should he attempt to descend a river even more terrible to navigate than the San Juan? It seemed to him that the hardships and dangers of either plan were about the same.
But the Colorado route would be the swiftest; the Colorado would take him quickest to Clara. For he trusted that she had long before this got back to the Moqui country and resumed her journey across the continent. He could not really fear that any deadly harm would befall her. He had the firmness of a soldier and the faith of a lover.
At last, silently and solemnly, through a portal thousands of feet in height, the voyagers glided into the perilous mystery of the Great Cañon of the Colorado, the most sublime and terrible waterway of this planet.
Thurstane had strange emotions as he swept into the "caverns measureless to man" of the Great Cañon of the Colorado.
It seemed like a push of destiny rather than a step of volition. An angel or a demon impelled him into the unknown; a supernatural portal had opened to give him passage; then it had closed behind him forever.
The cañon, with all its two hundred and forty miles of marvels and perils, presented itself to his imagination as a unity. The first step within it placed him under an enchantment from which there was no escape until the whole circuit of the spell should be completed. He was like Orlando in the magic garden, when the gate vanished immediately upon his entrance, leaving him no choice but to press on from trial to trial. He was no more free to pause or turn back than Grecian ghosts sailing down Acheron toward the throne of Radamanthus.
Direct statement, and even the higher speech of simile, fail to describe the Great Cañon and the emotion which it produces. Were its fronting precipices organs, with their mountainous columns and pilasters for organ-pipes, they might produce ade profundisworthy of the scene and of its sentiments, its inspiration. This is not bombast; so far from exaggerating it does not even attain to the subject; no words can so much as outline the effects of eighty leagues of mountain sculptured by a great river.
Let us venture one comparison. Imagine a groove a foot broad and twenty feet deep, with a runnel of water trickling at the bottom of it and a fleck of dust floating down the rivulet. Now increase the dimensions until the groove is two hundred and fifty feet in breadth by five thousand feet in depth, and the speck a boat with three voyagers. You have the Great Cañon of the Colorado and Thurstane and his comrades seeking its issue.
"Do you call this a counthry?" asked Sweeny, after an awe-stricken silence. "I'm thinkin' we're gittin' outside av the worrld like."
"An' I'm thinkin' we're gittin' too fur inside on't," muttered Glover. "Look's 's though we might slip clean under afore long. Most low-spirited hole I ever rolled into. 'Minds me 'f that last ditch people talk of dyin' in. Must say I'd rather be in the trough 'f the sea."
"An' what kind av a trough is that?" inquired Sweeny, inquisitive even in his dumps.
"It's the trough where they feed the niggers out to the sharks."
"Faix, an' I'd loike to see it at feedin' time," answered Sweeny with a feeble chuckle.
Nature as it is is one image; nature as it appears is a thousand; or rather it is infinite. Every soul is a mirror, reflecting what faces it; but the reflections differ as do the souls that give them. To the three men who now gazed on the Great Cañon it was far from being the same object.
Sweeny surveyed it as an old Greek or Roman might, with simple distaste and horror. Glover, ignorant and limited as he was, received far more of its inspiration. Even while "chirking up" his companions with trivial talk and jests he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan's Dark Valley and Milton's Hell, the two sublimest landscapes that had ever been presented to his imagination. Thurstane, gifted with much of the sympathy of the great Teutonic race for nature, was far more profoundly affected. The overshadowing altitudes and majesties of the chasm moved him as might oratorios or other solemn music. Frequently he forgot hardships, dangers, isolation, the hard luck of the past, the ugly prospects of the future in reveries which were a succession of such emotions as wonder, worship, and love.
No doubt the scenery had the more power over him because, by gazing at it day after day while his heart was full of Clara, he got into a way of animating it with her. Far away as she was, and divided from him perhaps forever, she haunted the cañon, transformed it and gave it grace. He could see her face everywhere; he could see it even without shutting his eyes; it made the arrogant and malignant cliffs seraphic. By the way, the vividness of his memory with regard to that fair, sweet, girlish countenance was wonderful, only that such a memory, the memory of the heart, is common. There was not one of her expressions which was not his property. Each and all, he could call them-up at will, making them pass before him in heavenly procession, surrounding himself with angels. It was the power of the ring which is given to the slaves of love.
He had some vagaries (the vagaries of those who are subjugated by a strong and permanent emotion) which approached insanity. For instance, he selected a gigantic column of sandstone as bearing some resemblance to Clara, and so identified it with her that presently he could see her face crowning it, though concealed by the similitude of a rocky veil. This image took such possession of him that he watched it with fascination, and when a monstrous cliff slid between it and him he felt as if here were a new parting; as if he were once more bidding her a speechless, hopeless farewell.
During the greater part of this voyage he was a very uninteresting companion. He sat quiet and silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips; he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered him an eccentric.
"Naterally not quite himself," judged the skipper. "Some folks is born knocked on the head."
"May be officers is always that a way," was one of Sweeny's suggestions. "It must be mighty dull bein' an officer."
We must not forget the Great Cañon. The voyagers were amid magnitudes and sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and principalities of supernature. They were borne through an architecture of aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and stonehenges.
For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of the cañon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible. Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again, where it was entered by minor cañons, it became a breach through crowded pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries. Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and elevations, which would have been monstrous in other landscapes, were here but minor decorations.
Something like half of the strata with which earth is sheathed has been cut through by the Colorado, beginning at the top of the groove with hundreds of feet of limestone, and closing at the bottom with a thousand feet of granite. Here, too, as in many other wonder-spots of the American desert, nature's sculpture is rivalled by her painting. Bluish-gray limestone, containing corals; mottled limestone, charged with slates, flint, and chalcedony; red, brown, and blue limestone, mixed with red, green, and yellow shales; sandstone of all tints, white, brown, ochry, dark red, speckled and foliated; coarse silicious sandstone, and red quartzose sandstone beautifully veined with purple; layers of conglomerate, of many colored shales, argillaceous iron, and black oxide manganese; massive black and white granite, traversed by streaks of quartz and of red sienite; coarse red felspathic granite, mixed with large plates of silver mica; such is the masonry and such the frescoing.
Through this marvellous museum our three spectators wandered in hourly peril of death. The Afreets of the waters and the Afreets of the rocks, guarding the gateway which they had jointly builded, waged incessant warfare with the intruders. Although the current ran five miles an hour, it was a lucky day when the boat made forty miles. Every evening the travellers must find a beach or shelf where they could haul up for the night. Darkness covered destruction, and light exposed dangers. The bubble-like nature of the boat afforded at once a possibility of easy advance and of instantaneous foundering. Every hour that it floated was a miracle, and so they grimly and patiently understood it.
A few days in the cañon changed the countenances of these men. They looked like veterans of many battles. There was no bravado in their faces. The expression which lived there was a resigned, suffering, stubborn courage. It was the "silent berserker rage" which Carlyle praises. It was the speechless endurance which you see in portraits of the Great Frederick, Wellington, and Grant.
They relieved each other. The bow was guard duty; the steering was light duty; the midships off duty. It must be understood that, the great danger being sunken rocks, one man always crouched in the bow, with a paddle plunged below the surface, feeling for ambushes of the stony bushwhackers. Occasionally all three had to labor, jumping into shallows, lifting the boat over beds of pebbles, perhaps lightening it of arms and provisions, perhaps carrying all ashore to seek a portage.
"It's the best canew 'n' the wust canew I ever see for sech a voyage," observed Glover. "Navigatin' in it puts me in mind 'f angels settin' on a cloud. The cloud can go anywhere; but what if ye should slump through?"
"Och! ye're a heretic, 'n' don't belave angels can fly," put in Sweeny.
"Can't ye talk without takin' out yer paddle?" called Glover. "Mind yer soundings."
Glover was at the helm just then, while Sweeny was at the bow. Thurstane, sitting cross-legged on the light wooden flooring of the boat, was entering topographical observations in his journal. Hearing the skipper's warning, he looked up sharply; but both the call and the glance came too late to prevent a catastrophe. Just in that instant the boat caught against some obstacle, turned slowly around before the push of the current, swung loose with a jerk and floated on, the water bubbling through the flooring. A hole had been torn in the canvas, and the cockle-shell was foundering.
"Sound!" shouted Thurstane to Sweeny; then, turning to Glover, "Haul up the Grizzly!"
The tub-boat of bearskin was dragged alongside, and Thurstane instantly threw the provisions and arms into it.
"Three foot," squealed Sweeny.
"Jump overboard," ordered the lieutenant.
By the time they were on their feet in the water the Buchanan was half full, and the swift current was pulling at it like a giant, while the Grizzly, floating deep, was almost equally unmanageable. The situation had in one minute changed from tranquil voyaging to deadly peril. Sweeny, unable to swim, and staggering in the rapid, made a plunge at the bearskin boat, probably with an idea of getting into it. But Thurstane, all himself from the first, shouted in that brazen voice of military command which is so secure of obedience, "Steady, man! Don't climb in. Cut the lariat close up to the Buchanan, and then hold on to the Grizzly."
Restored to his self-possession, Sweeny laboriously wound the straining lariat around his left arm and sawed it in two with his jagged pocket-knife. Then came a doubtful fight between him and the Colorado for the possession of the heavy and clumsy tub.
Meantime Thurstane and Glover, the former at the bow and the latter at the stern of the Buchanan, were engaged in a similar tussle, just barely holding on and no more.
"We can't stand this," said the officer. "We must empty her."
"Jest so," panted Glover. "You're up stream. Can you raise your eend? We mustn't capsize her; we might lose the flooring."
Thurstane stooped slowly and cautiously until he had got his shoulder under the bow.
"Easy!" called Glover. "Awful easy! Don't break her back. Don't upsetme."
Gently, deliberately, with the utmost care, Thurstane straightened himself until he had lifted the bow of the boat clear of the current.
"Now I'll hoist," said the skipper. "You turn her slowly—jest the least mite. Don't capsize her."
It was a Herculean struggle. There was still a ponderous weight of water in the boat. The slight frame sagged and the flexible siding bulged. Glover with difficulty kept his feet, and he could only lift the stern very slightly.
"You can't do it," decided Thurstane. "Don't wear yourself out trying it. Hold steady where you are, while I let down."
When the boat was restored to its level it floated higher than before, for some of the water had drained out.
"Now lift slowly," directed Thurstane. "Slow and sure. She'll clear little by little."
A quiet, steady lift, lasting perhaps two or three minutes, brought the floor of the boat to the surface of the current.
"It's wearing," said the lieutenant, cheering his worried fellow-laborer with a smile. "Stand steady for a minute and try to rest. You, Sweeny, move in toward the bank. Hold on to your boat like the devil. If the water deepens, sing out."
Sweeny, gripping his lariat desperately, commenced a staggering march over the cobble-stone bottom, his anxious nose pointed toward a beach of bowlders beneath the southern precipice.
"Now then," said Thurstane to Glover, "we must get her on our heads and follow Sweeny. Are you ready? Up with her!"
A long, reeling hoist set the Buchanan on the heads of the two men, one standing under the bow and one under the stern, their arms extended and their hands clutching the sides. The beach was forty yards away; the current was swift and as opaque as chocolate; they could not see what depths might gape before them; but they must do the distance without falling, or perish.
"Left foot first," shouted the officer. "Forward—march!"
When the adventurers commenced their tottering march toward the shore of the Colorado, Sweeny, dragging the clumsy bearskin boat, was a few yards in advance of Thurstane and Glover, bearing the canvas boat.
Every one of the three had as much as he could handle. The Grizzly, pulled at by the furious current, bobbed up and down and hither and thither, nearly capsizing Sweeny at every other step. The Buchanan, weighing one hundred and fifty pounds when dry, and now somewhat heavier because of its thorough wetting, made a heavy load for two men who were hip deep in swift water.
"Slow and sure," repeated Thurstane. "It's a five minutes job. Keep your courage and your feet for five minutes. Then we'll live a hundred years."
"Liftinant, is this soldierin'?" squealed Sweeny.
"Yes, my man, this is soldiering."
"Thin I'll do me dooty if I pull me arrms off."
But there was not much talking. Pretty nearly all their breath was needed for the fight with the river. Glover, a slender and narrow-shouldered creature, was particularly distressed; and his only remark during the pilgrimage shoreward was, "I'd like to change hosses."
Sweeny, leading the way, got up to his waist once and yelled, "I'll drown."
Then he backed a little, took a new direction, found shallower water, and tottled onward to victory. The moment he reached the shore he gave a shrill hoot of exultation, went at his bearskin craft with both hands, dragged it clean out of the water, and gave it a couple of furious kicks.
"Take that!" he yelped. "Ye're wickeder nor both yer fathers. But I've bate ye. Oh, ye blathering jerkin', bogglin' baste, ye!"
Then he splashed into the river, joined his hard-pressed comrades, got his head under the centre of the Buchanan, and lifted sturdily. In another minute the precious burden was safe on a large flat rock, and the three men were stretched out panting beside it. Glover was used up; he was trembling from head to foot with fatigue; he had reached shore just in time to fall on it instead of into the river.
"Ye'd make a purty soldier," scoffed Sweeny, a habitual chaffer, like most Irishmen.
"It was the histin' that busted me," gasped the skipper. "I can't handle a ton o' water."
"Godamighty made ye already busted, I'm a thinkin'," retorted Sweeny.
As soon as Glover could rise he examined the Buchanan. There was a ragged rent in the bottom four inches long, and the canvas in other places had been badly rubbed. The voyagers looked at the hole, looked at the horrible chasm which locked them in, and thought with a sudden despair of the great environment of desert.
The situation could hardly be more gloomy. Having voyaged for five days in the Great Cañon, they were entangled in the very centre of the folds of that monstrous anaconda. Their footing was a lap of level not more than thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation. Above them rose a precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was undoubtedly a mile in height. Had there been armies or cities over their heads, they could not have discovered it by either eye or ear.
At their feet was the Colorado, a broad rush of liquid porphyry, swift and pitiless. By its color and its air of stoical cruelty it put one in mind of the red race of America, from whose desert mountains it came and through whose wildernesses it hurried. On the other side of this grim current rose precipices five thousand feet high, stretching to right and left as far as the eye could pierce. Certainly never before did shipwrecked men gaze upon such imprisoning immensity and inhospitable sterility.
Directly opposite them was horrible magnificence. The face of the fronting rampart was gashed a mile deep by the gorge of a subsidiary cañon. The fissure was not a clean one, with even sides. The strata had been torn, ground, and tattered by the river, which had first raged over them and then through them. It was a Petra of ruins, painted with all stony colors, and sculptured into a million outlines. On one of the boldest abutments of the ravine perched an enchanted castle with towers and spires hundreds of feet in height. Opposite, but further up the gap, rose a rounded mountain-head of solid sandstone and limestone. Still higher and more retired, towering as if to look into the distant cañon of the Colorado, ran the enormous terrace of one of the loftier plateaus, its broad, bald forehead wrinkled with furrows that had once held cataracts. But language has no charm which can master these sublimities and horrors. It stammers; it repeats the same words over and over; it can onlybeginto tell the monstrous truth.
"Looks like we was in our grave," sighed Glover.
"Liftinant," jerked out Sweeny, "I'm thinkin' we're dead. We ain't livin', Liftinant. We've been buried. We've no business trying towalk."
Thurstane had the same sense of profound depression; but he called up his courage and sought to cheer his comrades.
"We must do our best to come to life," he said. "Mr. Glover, can nothing be done with the boat?"
"Can't fix it," replied the skipper, fingering the ragged hole. "Nothin' to patch it with."
"There are the bearskins," suggested Thurstane.
Glover slapped his thigh, got up, danced a double-shuffle, and sat down again to consider his job. After a full minute Sweeny caught the idea also and set up a haw-haw of exultant laughter, which brought back echoes from the other side of the cañon, as if a thousand Paddies were holding revel there.
"Oh! yees may laugh," retorted Sweeny, "but yees can't laugh us out av it."
"I'll sheath the whole bottom with bearskin," said Glover. "Then we can let her grind. It'll be an all day's chore, Capm—perhaps two days."
They passed thirty-six hours in this miserable bivouac. Glover worked during every moment of daylight. No one else could do anything. A green hand might break a needle, and a needle broken was a step toward death. From dawn to dusk he planned, cut, punctured, and sewed with the patience of an old sailor, until he had covered the rent with a patch of bearskin which fitted as if it had grown there. Finally the whole bottom was doubled with hide, the long, coarse fur still on it, and the grain running from stem to stern so as to aid in sliding over the sand and pebbles of the shallows.
While Glover worked the others slept, lounged, cooked, waited. There was no food, by the way, but the hard, leathery, tasteless jerked meat of the grizzly bears, which had begun to pall upon them so they could hardly swallow it. Eating was merely a duty, and a disagreeable one.
When Glover announced that the boat was ready for launching, Sweeny uttered a yelp of joy, like a dog who sees a prospect of hunting.
"Ah, you paddywhack!" growled the skipper. "All this work for you. Punch another hole, 'n' I'll take yer own hide to patch it."
"I'll give ye lave," returned Sweeny. "Wan bare skin 's good as another. Only I might want me own back agin for dress-parade."
Once more on the Colorado. Although the boat floated deeper than before, navigation in it was undoubtedly safer, so that they made bolder ventures and swifter progress. Such portages, however, as they were still obliged to traverse, were very severe, inasmuch as the Buchanan was now much above its original weight. Several times they had to carry one half of their materials for a mile or more, through a labyrinth of rocks, and then trudge back to get the other half.
Meantime their power of endurance was diminishing. The frequent wettings, the shivering nights, the great changes of temperature, the stale and wretched food, the constant anxiety, were sapping their health and strength. On the tenth day of their wanderings in the Great Cañon Glover began to complain of rheumatism.
"These cussed draughts!" he groaned. "It's jest like travellin' in a bellows nozzle."
"Wid the divil himself at the bellys," added Sweeny. "Faix, an' I wish he'd blow us clane out intirely. I'm gittin' tired o' this same, I am. I didn't lisht to sarve undher ground."
"Patience, Sweeny," smiled Thurstane. "We must be nearly through the cañon."
"An' where will we come out, Liftinant? Is it in Ameriky? Bedad, we ought to be close to the Chaynees by this time. Liftinant, what sort o' paple lives up atop of us, annyway?"
"I don't suppose anybody lives up there," replied the officer, raising his eyes to the dizzy precipices above. "This whole region is said to be a desert."
"Be gorry, an' it 'll stay a desert till the ind o' the worrld afore I'll poppylate it. It wasn't made for Sweenys. I haven't seen sile enough in tin days to raise wan pataty. As for livin' on dried grizzly, I'd like betther for the grizzlies to live on me. Liftinant, I niver see sich harrd atin'. It tires the top av me head off to chew it."
About noon of the twelfth day in the Great Cañon this perilous and sublime navigation came to a close. The walls of the chasm suddenly spread out into a considerable opening, which absolutely seemed level ground to the voyagers, although it was encumbered with mounds or buttes of granite and sandstone. This opening was produced by the entrance into the main channel of a subsidiary one, coming from the south. At first they did not observe further particulars, for they were in extreme danger of shipwreck, the river being studded with rocks and running like a mill-race. But on reaching the quieter water below the rapid, they saw that the branch cañon contained a rivulet, and that where the two streams united there was a triangular basin, offering a safe harbor.
"Paddle!" shouted Thurstane, pointing to the creek. "Don't let her go by. This is our place."
A desperate struggle dragged the boat out of the rushing Colorado into the tranquillity of the basin. Everything was landed; the boat itself was hoisted on to the rocks; the voyage was over.
"Think ye know yer way, Capm?" queried Glover, squinting doubtfully up the arid recesses of the smaller cañon.
"Of course I may be mistaken. But even if it is not Diamond Creek, it will take us in our direction. We have made westing enough to have the Cactus Pass very nearly south of us."
As there was still a chance of returning to the river, the boat was taken to pieces, rolled up, and hidden under a pile of stones and driftwood. The small remnant of jerked meat was divided into three portions. Glover, on account of his inferior muscle and his rheumatism, was relieved of his gun, which was given to Sweeny. Canteens were filled, blankets slung, ammunition belts buckled, and the march commenced.
Arrived at a rocky knoll which looked up both waterways, the three men halted to take a last glance at the Great Cañon, the scene of a pilgrimage that had been a poem, though a terrible one. The Colorado here was not more than fifty yards wide, and only a few hundred yards of its course were visible either way, for the confluence was at the apex of a bend. The dark, sullen, hopeless, cruel current rushed out of one mountain-built mystery into another. The walls of the abyss rose straight from the water into dizzy abutments, conical peaks, and rounded masses, beyond and above which gleamed the distant sunlit walls of a higher terrace of the plateau.
"Come along wid ye," said Sweeny to Glover, "It's enough to give ye the rheumatiz in the oyes to luk at the nasty black hole. I'm thinkin' it's the divil's own place, wid the fires out."
The Diamond Creek Cañon, although far inferior to its giant neighbor, was nevertheless a wonderful excavation, striking audaciously into sombre mountain recesses, sublime with precipices, peaks, and grotesque masses. The footing was of the ruggedest, adébrisof confused and eroded rocks, the pathway of an extinct river. One thing was beautiful: the creek was a perfect contrast to the turbid Colorado; its waters were as clear and bright as crystal. Sweeny halted over and over to look at it, his mouth open and eyes twinkling like a pleased dog.
"An' there's nothing nagurish about that, now," he chuckled. "A pataty ud laugh to be biled in it."
After slowly ascending for a quarter of a mile, they turned a bend and came upon a scene which seemed to them like a garden. They were in a broad opening, made by the confluence of two cañons. Into this gigantic rocky nest had been dropped an oasis of turf and of thickets of green willows. Through the centre of the verdure the Diamond Creek flowed dimpling over a pebbly bed, or shot in sparkles between barring bowlders, or plunged over shelves in toy cascades. The travellers had seen nothing so hospitable in nature since leaving the country of the Moquis weeks before.
Sweeny screamed like a delighted child. "Oh! an' that's just like ould Oirland. Oh, luk at the turrf! D'ye iver see the loikes o'that, now? The blessed turrf! Here ye be, right in the divil's own garden. Liftinant, if ye'll let me build a fort here, I'll garrison it. I'll stay here me whole term of sarvice."
"Halt," said Thurstane. "We'll eat, refill canteens, and inspect arms. If this is Diamond Cañon, and I think there is no doubt of it, we may expect to find Indians soon."
"I'll fight 'em," declared Sweeny. "An' if they've got anythin' betther nor dried grizzly, I'll have it."
"Wait for orders," cautioned Thurstane. "No firing without orders."
After cleaning their guns and chewing their tough and stale rations, they resumed their march, leaving the rivulet and following the cañon, which led toward the southwest. As they were now regaining the level of the plateau, their advance was a constant and difficult ascent, sometimes struggling through labyrinths of detached rocks, and sometimes climbing steep shelves which had once been the leaping-places of cataracts. The sides of the chasm were two thousand feet high, and it was entered by branch ravines of equal grandeur.
The sun had set for them, although he was still high above the horizon of upper earth, when Thurstane halted and whispered, "Wigwams!"
Perched among the rocks, some under projecting strata and others in shadowy niches between huge buttresses, they discovered at first three or four, then a dozen, and finally twenty wretched cabins. They scarcely saw before they were seen; a hideous old squaw dropped a bundle of fuel and ran off screeching; in a moment the whole den was in an uproar. Startling yells burst from lofty nooks in the mountain flanks, and scarecrow figures dodged from ambush to ambush of the sombre gully. It was as if they had invaded the haunts of the brownies.
The Hualpais, a species of Digger Indians, dwarfish, miserable, and degraded, living mostly on roots, lizards, and the like, were nevertheless conscious of scalps to save. In five minutes from the discovery of the strangers they had formed a straggling line of battle, squatting along a ledge which crossed the cañon. There were not twenty warriors, and they were no doubt wretchedly armed, but their position was formidable.
Sweeny, looking like an angry rat, his nose twitching and eyes sparkling with rage, offered to storm the rampart alone, shouting, "Oh, the nasty, lousy nagurs! Let 'em get out of our way."
"Guess we'd better talk to the cusses," observed Glover. "Tain't the handiest place I ever see for fightin'; an' I don't keer 'bout havin' my ears 'n' nose bored any more at present."
"Stay where you are," said Thurstane. "I'll go forward and parley with them."