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 a _de profundis_ worthy 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 upset
_me_."
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!"