THE GREAT GORGE--THE END
"FINE boy, Juarez," rang out Jim's voice. "We'll beat this roaring devil
yet."
No sooner had Jim spoken than our chance came. A change had taken place
in the situation, as there was an opportunity to land on the west shore,
as the canyon had ended and there was a break between it and the canyon
following.
If we did not land now we would probably land at the bottom of the
river, for we could not hope to run another canyon. Those below were
terrific gorges, dangerous under ordinary conditions, but with the rush
of the flood waters, absolutely impossible.
We were favored for the moment by a change in the condition of the
river. The first rush of the drift had passed and there was a
comparatively smooth stretch of water, but further up the river great
red waves were coming with reinforcements of logs and timbers against
our boat.
"To the oars," yelled Jim, "we must get out of this now or go under."
Juarez and I sprang forward with lightning quickness, placed the oars in
position, and then we pulled, how we pulled! Biting the raging current
of the river with rapid strokes.
Exerting his strength to the very utmost, Jim fought the boat towards
the shore. He seemed animated with a fury equal to the floods.
"Pull, pull," yelled Tom in frenzy. "Here comes a log to kill us."
It was bearing down toward us with awful swiftness. Its great end, three
or four feet across, was like a battering ram in the swift swing of the
current, ready to demolish us.
It was the last blow of the river, escape it and we would be safe. No
need to urge us. Our oars foamed into the current and "The Captain"
responded. Down it came, flung forward on a wave above Jim's head. With
a desperate surge of strength Juarez and I gave a last pull together and
the great log swept by our stern by six inches.
We were saved. With a few more strokes under Jim's skillful steering, we
grounded our boat on the shore. Utterly exhausted Tom and I fell forward
on the ground when we landed, our faces buried in our arms. Tom was
sobbing hysterically. Little wonder! Even to stand on the shore and
watch the raging river would frighten most of you into a chill.
Jim now turned and shook his fist at the baffled river.
"We fooled you," he yelled. "You don't get us or 'The Captain,' either."
Juarez said nothing, but sat on a rock breathing heavily, his hands
hanging down before him. Without his help, quickness and skill we would
never have made it.
We made our camp where we had landed, resting and repairing our boat.
The river went down as rapidly as it had come up, for the flood had been
due to a cloud burst and not to melting snow or a continuous storm.
On the third morning we were all ready to start upon the final round
with the Colorado River. Before us was the marble canyon and the great
gorge of the Grand Canyon.
Tom and I had recovered our equilibrium by the time we were ready to
reembark. We felt reasonably confident of being able to navigate the
gorges which were ahead.
"I shall be glad when we get through with this hilarious and irregular
life," said Tom. "I don't believe any of us would have started if we
could have known what we would have to go through with."
"I would," claimed Jim. "We have to hustle sometimes. But if you had
stayed in the peaceful East you would have probably have gone bathing in
some mill pond and got a cramp and drowned."
"You can't stop long enough in these darned canyons to get drowned,"
growled Tom.
We all laughed heartily at Tom's complaints. He was never so funny as
when he was irritable.
"Another thing," said Tom in conclusion, "I'm not going to give up that
search for treasure till we find it."
About noon of the day we started we saw ahead of us the shining walls of
the greatest chasm that we had yet faced.
"Is that the Grand Canyon itself?" I asked.
"No," said Jim, who had been studying the maps carefully during our last
stop. "That must be the Marble Canyon. The Little Colorado will come in
below there somewhere."
"Is it really marble?" inquired Tom.
"You can see for yourself soon," said Jim.
However, names are deceitful things. It was indeed a marvelous gorge
into which we entered. Where the waves of the river had worked, there
shone a beautiful greyish marble, cut in curious deep lines by the
action of the water, but above the walls were stained a deep red.
There was a massive solidness about this marble canyon that made the
sandstone gorges appear light and airy. The walls rose in places to over
three thousand feet in height.
Sometimes the walls were in thousand-foot terraces, sometimes well nigh
perpendicular, at least so it seemed. It was, with all its grandeur,
only the entrance hall for the Grand Canyon itself. Its peculiarity was
in the sharp thrust out cliffs that rose perpendicularly from the river.
The Little Colorado was well named, for the river itself was but a small
stream, but the narrow gorge by which it entered was impressive. It is
the mingling of the Little Colorado with Marble Canyon that constitutes
the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
But it in reality is not quite so magically logical as that, since from
miles below the entrance of the Little Colorado, the canyon walls fall
away from the river and the canyon is like a great valley with
perpendicular walls removed for several miles on either side of the
river, and rising to a height of five thousand feet. Before us lay the
great gorge, where the river seemed to lose itself in granite gloom as
it wound downwards.
"Let's make a camp in this valley," suggested Jim, "and do some climbing
before we take our last sprint down the river."
"I guess it will be our last too," groaned Tom, gloomily.
"Oh shut up!" commanded Jim wearily, giving him a kick with his
moccasined foot. "You ought to have lived in the times of Jeremiah."
"You ought to have lived in the Stone Age," retorted Tom, "it would have
just suited you."
We made camp near a pleasant looking green stretch of shore and on the
following day we started out on our little picnic excursion that
consumed several days.
It would take another book to describe what we saw on that trip. After
some remarkably hard work and interesting climbing we reached the rim of
the canyon, some six thousand feet above the Colorado, that seemed but a
narrow rivulet and its long familiar roar was reduced to a gentle purr
of sound.
We saw below and around us one of the unequalled panoramas of the world.
Back of us was the black plateau of the great forest land, called the
"Kaibab," covered with pines, and beneath our feet was the Grand Canyon
itself. Twelve miles from rim to rim and in the chasm were towers,
pinnacles, terraced plateaus, palaces and temples, and in the distance,
faint and fair formations of beauty and of light.
The coloring was the most wonderful of all. Deep down and far away was
the purple gneiss of the gorge, ribboned with granite, then on either
side of the river rose the various architectural forms and structures of
the canyon.
Based on purple, then a wonderful brown; widest of all the rich red of
the sandstone, while the highest pinnacles, peaks and plateaus had a
coping of white limestone to correspond with the eight hundred feet of
the same rock just below the rim.
But who shall tell of the glories of the sunset as the light fades from
the white of the western wall and the vast, vast canyon is filled with
the purple shadows!
"Wouldn't it jar you?" exclaimed Jim, the first to break the awestruck
silence that bound us, when its immensity first came under our eyes.
"Yes," said Tom, "if you stepped off it would."
Without foreboding, but with grim determination, we left our pleasant
camp on the bank of the river and swinging out into the current we
headed for the gorge.
Then in a moment we were swallowed up between its jaws as a fly goes
into the mouth of a lion. We were enured to dangers and terrible
hazards, these we were prepared to meet, nor did we encounter anything
equal to the flood of the week before. In that the Colorado had done its
worst.
But it was the sombreness and the gloom of that granite gorge that
overwhelmed us. It seemed as I have said, as though the river as it
plunged and roared downward between the dark and narrow walls, was
carrying us down into some nether and long-forgotten hell.
We could see little of the glorious upper canyon that was on either side
of the gorge whose walls rose perpendicularly above us for fifteen
hundred feet.
"One good thing about it," said Tom, "when we get through with this we
are through for certain."
"It won't take us long if we keep up this gait," I said, as we swept
downward like an express train, and the walls going by as fences do when
you look out from a car window. We ran into one terrible rapid where the
river was lashed into a mass of foam from wall to wall.
The waves poured over into our boat nearly swamping us. We pulled out of
it alive and the worst was over.
At last, at last, our war worn, battered boat drifted out into the broad
sunny reaches of the Colorado. Behind us was the gloom of the
labyrinthine, rock bound prison with the gnashing river within it
rushing ever downward, eager to escape.
We were glad, glad to have come through our terrific experiences alive
and though we were weather beaten, well and uninjured.
"Thank Heaven!" exclaimed Jim, as he steered down the broad unhampered
river.
So after some time of quiet journeying we came to the end of our trip.
We found a pleasant camping place near a cove where we anchored our
faithful boat. How splendidly it had carried us through.
Battered and beaten though it was, still perfectly seaworthy, or to be
more exact, riverworthy. It had been our home so many weeks that it
seemed to be a part of our lives, and we had a real affection for it,
like one has for a faithful dog who has been one's companion through
trials and dangers.
One evening we sat around the campfire, underneath the cottonwood trees
with the slow moving Colorado in the foreground. We had been talking of
home, both in Kansas and York State and also of our old friend the
captain, when Jim spoke up:
"Gentlemen of the Order of the Colorado and fellow pioneers," he said,
in his most oratorical manner, "I move that we free and untrammeled
Americans proceed next to the invasion of Mexico."
This was carried with but one dissenting voice and that was Tom's, but
that was to be expected.
At this point I may say that "The Frontier Boys in Mexico, or Mystery
Mountain," will be a book of varied and exciting incidents which take
place in a wonderfully interesting and remarkable country. And now for a
brief time I bid you adios.
As the reader who has been with us all through this trip from the fight
with the Apaches to the navigation of the Grand Canyon seems to be a
good fellow he is invited to come along too. You may not learn as much
of the grandeurs of nature, which have in considerable measure found
place in this book, but with exciting adventure it will be replete.