University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.

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 keelless
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,

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.