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 Cyclopean _débris_, 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.