Overland :: :: University of Virginia Library

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

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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 sllent; 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, pryamids, 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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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!”