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, the _débris_ of 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 leave _there_" 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 far
Outshone 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.