THE CANYON DE CHELLEY
We had been pulled out of difficulties by donkeys, men, autos and
pulleys. It remained for Kayenta to show us a new way out. When a
terrific thank-you-marm jolted off our power, our late host’s daughter
rode out on her stout cow-pony, roped us, so to speak, and started
forward as though she intended to tow us. The knowing horse, who had
seen thousands of steers act as the old lady was doing now, treated the
car with equal contempt, and braced her feet. It was thirty-horse to
one-horse power, but the better animal won. We slid forward in gear,
jolting our power on again as we moved ahead.
Sluggish after two week’s hard exercise, we were late in getting
started for Chin Le. Thunderous clouds were already blackening the
afternoon sky. They greatly increased the desert’s beauty, making it
majestic beyond words. Soon the storm burst, and silver sheets of rain
obliterated everything but the distant red hills. We were in the middle
of a flat plain with landmarks more or less like any other landmarks.
By twilight we were traveling through thick, red mud, and by dark the
mud had disappeared beneath an inland lake. The road was not. We only
knew we kept to it, in some miraculous fashion, because we continued
slowly to progress. Halfway to Chin Le we stopped in the dark at a
little trader’s post, bought gasoline at seventy-five cents a gallon,
and continued our splashing. All we could see between two lines of
hills was water. We lost the road for a moment, got into a deep draw,
and when we emerged from our bath, the generating system was no more.
Around us was blackness, with a few distant mesas outlined through
the slashing rain. The men got out, and examined the machinery, while
Toby and I stayed within, enjoying the luxury of a breakdown which
necessitated no exertion on our part. They returned covered with mud
halfway to the knees. The guide volunteered to walk to Chin Le for
help. It might be five or ten miles. We promised, rather unnecessarily,
not to move till he returned. He took our one electric torch, and
vanished into the blackest night I ever saw. A forlorn feeling settled
over us. We had no light, little food and no guide, and no present
means of transportation. If our guide fell into some new-born raging
torrent, not one of us knew the way back.
In five minutes we were all asleep. We were awakened hours later by a
voice that meant business, shouting “Stop! Who’s there?”
Murray’s round, red face loomed above the front seat like the rising
moon.
“Who’s there?” The Golfer took up the challenge.
We in the back seat trembled. Whoever was there had us at his mercy.
We were entirely unarmed. Nobody answered, and in a few minutes we
regained enough courage to ask questions in bated whispers.
“What did you see, Murray?”
“The burglar,” said Murray, looking bewildered. Then it dawned on us
he had been having a nightmare, and we all breathed again.
“What time is it?” someone asked.
“One o’clock.” We looked at each other. The guide had been gone four
hours.
“Had we better hunt for him?” asked Murray.
“Where could we go?” asked the Golfer.
That seemed to settle all question of action. We repacked ourselves
and I made myself more comfortable by removing a suitcase from my left
foot, and Toby’s specimens from the back of my neck, and soon we were
asleep again. It seemed heartless, not knowing the guide’s fate, but I
suppose we reasoned we could face tragedy better if we had our sleep
out. So quiet followed. We awoke through the night only to complain of
a paralyzed foot or arm, and demand our share of the car and covers.
A strange informality prevailed, as must when five people, each
aggressively bent on obtaining his proper amount of rest, occupy one
touring car all night.
At four, a hideous noise awoke us. Murray had fallen on the horn, and
had brought forth sound. It took us a moment to realize this meant
the return of our power. We were free to go ahead. But with north,
south, east and west completely disguised as an inland sea, we thought
it discreet to wait till sunrise. We no longer hoped for the guide’s
return, and gloomily looked for a sad ending to our trip.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE CANYON DE CHELLEY.]
The sunrise, when it came, was worth waiting for. Fresh-washed and
glowing, the holiday colors of the hills came out from the mediocre
buffs and grays of the desert, and the primrose sky slowly became
gilded with glory. As nothing exceeds the weariness of the desert at
noon, so nothing compares with its freshness, its revelation of beauty,
at dawn. Each mesa was outlined in gold. Waves of color, each melting
into the next, flushed the prairie and sky. We forgot the tedium of the
night in this splendor of morning.
We motored slowly through all this glory,--our car having started
on the first trial,--through seven miles of mud, but Chin Le had
apparently been swallowed up by the deluge. The mesas took on an
unfamiliar aspect, and we concluded that hidden by some gully, we had
gone beyond our destination. A red-banded Navajo on a pinto rode up
curiously when we called him. He was the only soul on the vast horizon,
and he understood no English, and appeared slow in comprehending our
Navajo. Waving his hand vaguely in the direction from which we came, he
repeated one word.
“Ishklish!”
“If we only knew what ishklish meant we should be all right,” said Toby
hopefully.
“Not ishklish,--slicklish,” corrected the Golfer who had made quite a
specialty of Navajo, and who could pronounce, “De-jiss-je” better than
any of us. “Slicklish! I know I’ve heard that word before.”
“Ishklish! Slicklish,” we repeated with bent brows, in Gilbertian
chorus. “We’ve heard that word before. We’re _sure_ we’ve heard that
word before.”
“Ishklish!” assented the Navajo.
The Golfer pursued his philological meditations to a triumphant end.
“Slicklish means matches!” he announced.
His discovery did not impress us as he expected.
“Why should he come up to a party of motorists at five in the morning
to say ‘matches’?” we asked.
“Because he wants a cigarette,” answered our linguist. “As it is a
marked discourtesy among Indians to offer a cigarette without matches,
he takes the more subtle way of begging a smoke by asking for matches.
Slicklish!”
“Ishklish!” nodded the Navajo. Apparently he could keep on like that
forever.
Pulling out his cigarette case, the Golfer gave the Indian a handful
with a match. The latter gave us a radiant smile, and rode away.
“You see that’s what he meant.”
Murray often put his finger on the point. “What good does that do us?”
he asked.
Following the Navajo’s vague gestures, we came at last within sight of
the long government buildings of Chin Le. But between them and us an
arroyo lay, no longer the puddle we had splashed through on our way to
Kayenta, but four feet of red torrent which had already cut down the
soft banks into miniature cliffs, and completely barred our crossing.
We shuddered when we saw it, and thought how easy it would be for a man
to slip over these slippery banks in the dark. Now seriously concerned
at the guide’s failure to appear, the two men started off to find
if possible a ford they might safely attempt, while we got out the
coffee pot, and built a tiny fire of twigs, the only fuel in sight.
The matches were wet, the sugar melted, and the can-opener lost. By
the time we managed to get the coffee boiling we saw a two horse team
crossing the stream, with the trader and the missing guide on the front
seat.
[Illustration: QUICKSAND; CANYON DE CHELLEY.]
“Where did you spend the night?” we asked, much relieved to see him
alive.
“In bed, at Mr. Stagg’s,” he answered. He explained that he had reached
Chin Le safely, and had taken a wagon out to find us, but failing to do
so, had gone back to bed. He started out in the morning just in time to
save Murray and the Golfer from a cold swim.
Leaving the car until the flood should abate, we piled our belongings
and ourselves into the wagon, and started across the muddy stream. The
water rose to the hubs, then to the horses’ shoulders. One stepped in a
hole, almost disappearing, and nearly carrying the wagon with him, but
at last we crossed safely, and reached Stagg’s in time for breakfast.
We told the adventures of the night, ending with our encounter with the
Navajo.
“What does ishklish mean?” we asked.
“You mean slicklish,” corrected the Golfer.
“Ishklish? Slicklish?” said Mr. Stagg. “Oh, you mean ushklush.”
“Well, what does ushklush mean?”
“Why, ushklush means mud.”
It is, I think, the best name for mud that could be invented,
especially the Navajo mud we had ushklushed through since dawn.
We were all unprepared for the Canyon de Chelley when we came upon it,
a few hours later. The entrance is the sort all such places should
have, casual, yet dramatic,--hiding one moment what it reveals with
telling effect the next. The rolling plain apparently spread for miles
without variation; nothing unusual, sand and bleak dunes, sage and
piñon, and behind, against buff hills, the rather ugly government
buildings, schools, hospitals, and like substitutes for freedom that
we give the Indian. We rode a few steps down a natural rocky incline,
and a wall opened, as it did for Aladdin, and through the aperture of
these gate-like cliffs we saw the beginning of a narrow valley, grassy
and fertile, bordering a river imprisoned for life between continuous
walls, smooth, dark red, varying in height from three hundred to three
thousand feet, and as unbroken as if some giant had sliced them with
his sword. We rode through this embodiment of Dead Man’s Gulch, and
came a few feet beyond on the canyon of whose beauty we had heard from
afar.
Canyon de Chelley is a dry river bed, with banks a thousand feet or
more in the air. In winter and early spring the water brims up to
the solid walls hemming it in on all sides, leaving no foothold for
horse or man. As it recedes, towards summer, it leaves broad strips
of beaches and fertile little green nooks under the shadow of the
cliffs, with the river meandering in the middle. Yet lovely as it is,
it has a Lorelei charm. Its yellow sands, when not thoroughly dry, are
treacherous,--quicksand of the worst sort.
With our outfit we had a large wagon, which our driver turned too
quickly over a new cut-bank. In an instant, the wagon toppled on two
wheels, and we had a vision of Toby and Martha flying through the air,
followed by bedding, cameras and supplies. Fortunately they barely
escaped the overturning wagon, which followed them, and landed unhurt.
Before we could reach them the contents of the wagon were entirely
covered by the sucking sand. Had it been spring, when the pull of
the quicksand is more vigorous, we should not have been able to recover
them.
[Illustration: NEAR THE ENTRANCE OF CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA. Canyon
de Chelley is a river bed with banks a thousand feet or more in air.]
Those of us who were on horseback followed the edge of the stream,
sometimes acting as guide for the wagon, sometimes following in its
slow wake. We galloped ahead, on the hard sands, level and smooth for
miles, or splashed to our horses’ knees in the deeper parts of the
stream, or edged them more cautiously through quicksands, of which
there still remained more than a trace. They sank to the ankles, and
each hoof left a little swirling, sucking well, which quickly filled
with water. But only one spot seemed at all dangerous.
The river was constantly turning and twisting upon itself, looking
back over its shoulder through gateways of sheer cliffs, smooth as if
someone had frosted them with chocolate icing. In the narrow space
between them a little Paradise of shade and sunlight, grass and
blossoming fruit trees, ran like a parti-colored ribbon. The Navajos
have planted peach trees in this fertile strip. Graceful cottonwoods
make an emerald shelter, and brooks branch into the central stream. The
river spreads out in great shallows at will, with rank grass growing
knee-high at its edge. Rocks like cathedrals stand guardian at every
turn, so close together sometimes that the sky is held prisoner in a
wedge of blue.
Patches of rough gardens cut into the flowered banks gave us our first
intimation that the Paradise sheltered an Adam and an Eve. Then we saw
wattled huts of willow, the summer hogans of Navajos, airier and more
graceful than their mud plastered winter huts. On turning a corner
where the receding river had already left a long, fertile island, we
came on an encampment of these brightly dressed, alert Arabs, with
their keen faces and winged poise. Horses and sheep were pastured near,
and under the trees several women had erected frames on which were
stretched half-finished rugs. Others, in their full gathered skirts
with gay flounces, rode their horses to water as easily as if they wore
breeches and puttees. Under the cliffs they looked like tiny dots. This
canyon is the favorite summer resort of neighboring Indians, and no
wonder. Here for a pleasant season they can forget the arid wastes of
the desert in their apricot orchards, and grow without travail their
corn and beans and melons.
We had scarcely left this gypsy encampment before we saw mute evidence
that the place had been beloved of more than one generation of Indians.
Nearly at the top of a rock clustered a few cliff houses, mere crannies
in the wall, and all along that unbroken cliff were little, scared
shelters, no bigger than mousetraps, watching with scared eyes as no
doubt their inmates did long ago, the approaches to their stronghold.
Tradition has it that the architects of these houses were ancestors of
the Hopis, driven here partly by enemies, partly by drought, but also
by the inspiration of their medicine men. It is not strange these empty
nests should be arresting sights, dating back to the antiquity when the
Hopis could turn into snakes, and the king’s son and his snake bride
followed the star which led them to Walpi. They may have inhabited the
very eyrie we saw. A tiny, bridal apartment it was, so inaccessible
at the top of this slab of rock that only a snake could climb to it.
Surely no entirely human feet would dare venture those heights.
[Illustration: CLIFF-DWELLINGS, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA.]
We were struck by the many isolated dwellings we came upon. Unlike
the extensive cities at Beta-Takin, at Walnut Canyon, and Mesa Verde,
these must have been intended for single families. Between the various
groups is a distance sometimes of a half mile, sometimes a mile.
The largest and by far the most impressive group in the canyon is
Casa Blanca, the White House of some ancient dignitary occupying a
commanding position looking far down the valley in both directions.
The river cuts deep and narrow here, with shallow islands between.
Above it by twenty feet is a bank where crumbling walls, painted with
prehistoric pictographs of birds and animals, stand under the shadow of
Casa Blanca. The rock is blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple
in the shadow. Seventy feet up, the whitewashed walls of this ancient
mansion are startlingly, romantically prominent, looking fresh enough
to have been painted yesterday.
How the former dwellers reached Casa Blanca is a puzzle. They must have
had the aid of ladders and niches in the rock. Today it is completely
inaccessible, except to Douglas Fairbanks, who once bounded lightly up
its side. A day’s ride down the left fork, overlooking a vale meant
for stately pleasure domes, is the Cave of the Mummies. This community
of cliff dwellings is so called because one startled explorer found
in it seven mummies, in perfect preservation. The cave can be reached
by diligent climbing, and aside from all interest in things past, the
view down that graceful, twisting valley is worth losing many hours of
breath.
We camped that night under a red monolith big enough to bury a nation
beneath it. The beauty of that scene is past my exhausted powers of
description. The campfire and the river, the smooth cliffs penetrating
the black sky with such strength and suavity, were the same essentials
as we found at the Rainbow Bridge, yet with all the difference in the
world. Grandeur was here, but not the rugged hurly-burly of Titans
which overwhelmed and dwarfed us there. Where the San Juan tumbles and
froths, and bursts over boulders, struggling and tumultuous, the de
Chelley river glides peacefully, widening about pretty shallows and
quiet islands. In Nonnezoshe Boco, the rocks are tortured into strange
shapes, twisted and wrung like wet clay; here they are planed smooth
and not tossed about helter-skelter, but rhythmically repeating the
pattern of the stream.
The essential quality of the Canyon de Chelley is not its grandeur,
I think, but its rhythm, and the opposite may be said of the Bridge.
Those who have seen only de Chelley might well challenge this
statement, for a river walled in its entire length by cliffs a quarter
to a half mile high can hardly be called less than tremendous. But
following as it does the meanderings of a whimsical stream, none of the
continuous pictures it makes lacks graceful composition. Here one could
spend pleasant months, loafing in those little groves by the river’s
brim. Now the Rainbow Trail could never be called pleasant. It is
ferocious, forbidding, terrible, desolate, vast,--with relieving oases
of garden and stream, but it does not invite to loaf. It is an arduous
and exacting pilgrimage. It does not smile, like de Chelley, nor remind
one of the gracious and stately landscapes of Claude Lorrain.
[Illustration: CASA BLANCA, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA. The rock is
blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple in the shadow.]
Perhaps a better climax would have been gained by seeing the Canyon
de Chelley first, and progressing to the Bridge, as we should have
done had de Chelley not been flooded when we stopped on our way to
Kayenta. But anticlimax or not, we loved the rest and relaxation after
our strenuous adventure. It was like entering Heaven and finding it
unexpectedly gay.