University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.

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, façades 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 façades 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 remanant 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 breside 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 showed 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,
and 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.