Overland Part 35

At one point two lateral canons opened side by side upon the San Juan. The part.i.tion was a stupendous pile of rock fifteen hundred feet in alt.i.tude, but so narrow that it seemed to the voyagers below like the single standing wall of some ruined edifice. Although the s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 ma.s.ses, vast outlines, prodigious a.s.semblages 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 circ.u.mstances, had he suddenly beheld Satan,

High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

He was roused from his dreams by the quick, dry, gra.s.shopper-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 canon, 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 canon, 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.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The three adventurers were entering the gorge of an impa.s.sable rapid.

Here had once been the barrier of a cataract; the waters had ground through it, tumbled it down, and gnawed it to tatters; the scattered bowlders which showed through the foam were the remnants of the Cyclopean feast.

There appeared to be no escape from death. Any one of those stones would rend the canvas boat from end to end, or double it into a wet rug; and if a swimmer should perchance reach the bank, he would drown there, looking up at precipices; or, if he should find a footing, it would only be to starve.

"There is our chance," said Thurstane, pointing to a bowlder as large as a house which stood under the northern wall of the canon, about a quarter of a mile above the first yeast of the rapid.

He and Glover each took a paddle. They had but one object: it was to get under the lee of the bowlder, and so stop their descent; after that they would see what more could be done. Danger and safety were alike swift here; it was a hurry as of battle or tempest Almost before they began to hope for success, they were circling in the narrow eddy, very nearly a whirlpool, which wheeled just below the isolated rock. Even here the utmost caution was necessary, for while the Buchanan was as light as a bubble, it was also as fragile.

Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying what next?

"I wish I was on an iceberg," said Glover in his despair.

"An' I wish I was in Oirland," added Sweeny. "But if the divil himself was to want to desart here, he couldn't."

Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should she escape her own perils. Through his field-gla.s.s he surveyed the whole gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain. It was as impossible to descend the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the canon. He had just heard Sweeny say, "I wish I was bein' murthered by thim naygurs," and had smiled at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope dawned upon him.

Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of the precipice. The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was evidently softer than the general ma.s.s; and in other days (centuries ago), when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply eroded. This erosion had been carried along the canon on an even line of alt.i.tude as far as the softer layer extended. Thurstane could trace it with his gla.s.s for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid. The groove was everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or so to nearly a rod.

Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle. The only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers would come to a jumping-off place. How high would it be? Could they get down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation? Well, they must try it; there was no other road. With one eloquent wave of his hand Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.

"Hurray!" shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.

"Can we make the jump at the other end?" asked the lieutenant.

"Reckon so," chirruped Glover. "Look a here."

He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a ma.s.s of strips of fresh hide.

"Hoss skin," he explained. "Peeled off a mustang. Borrowed it from that Texan cuss. Thought likely we might want to splice our towline. 'Bout ten fathom, I reckon; 'n' there's the lariat, two fathom more. All we've got to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, 'n' travel."

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when they commenced their preparations for making this extraordinary portage. Sunk as they were twenty-five hundred feet in the bowels of the earth, the sun had already set for them; but they were still favored with a sort of twilight radiance, and they could count upon it for a couple of hours longer.

Carefully the guns, paddles, and stores were landed on the marvellous causeway; and then, with still greater caution, the boat was lifted to the same support and taken to pieces. The whole ma.s.s of material, some two hundred pounds in weight, was divided into three portions. Each shouldered his pack, and the strange journey commenced.

"Sweeny, don't you fall off," said Glover. "We can't spare them sticks."

"If I fall off, ye may shute me where I stand," returned Sweeny. "I know better'n to get drowned and starved to death in wan. I can take care av meself. I've sailed this a way many a time in th' ould counthry."

The road was a smooth and easy one, barring a few c.u.mbering bowlders. To the left and below was the river, roaring, hissing, and foaming through its _chevaux-de-frise_ of rocks. In front the canon stretched on and on until its walls grew dim with shadow and distance. Above were overhanging precipices and a blue streak of sunlit sky.

It was quite dusk with the wanderers before they reached a point where the San Juan once more flowed with an undisturbed current.

"We can't launch by this light," said Thurstane. "We will sleep here."

"It'll be a longish night," commented Glover. "But don't see's we can shorten it by growlin'. When fellahs travel in the bowels 'f th' earth, they've got to follow the customs 'f th' country. Puts me in mind of Jonah in the whale's belly. Putty short tacks, Capm. Nine hours a day won't git us along; any too fast. But can't help it. Night travellin' ain't suited to our boat. Suthin' like a bladder football: one pin-p.r.i.c.k 'd cowallapse it. Wal, so we'll settle. Lucky we wanted our blankets to set on. 'Pears to me this rock's a leetle harder'n a common deck plank. Unroll the boat, Capm? Wal, guess we'd better. Needs dryin'a speck. Too much soakin' an't good for canvas. Better dry it out, 'n' fold it up, 'n' sleep on't. This pa.s.sageway that we're in, sh'd say at might git up a smart draught. What d'ye say to this spot for campin'? Twenty foot breadth of beam here. Kind of a stateroom, or bridal chamber. No need of fallin' out. Ever walk in yer sleep, Sweeny? Better cut it right square off to-night. Five fathom down to the river, sh'd say. Splash ye awfully, Sweeny."

Thus did Captain Glover prattle in his cheerful way while the party made its preparations for the night.

They were like ants lodged in some transverse crack of a lofty wall. They were in a deep cut of the shelf, with fifteen hundred or two thousand feet of sandstone above, and the porphyry-colored river thirty feet below. The narrow strip of sky far above their heads was darkening rapidly with the approach of night, and with an acc.u.mulation of clouds. All of a sudden there was a descent of muddy water, charged with particles of red earth and powdered sandstone, pouring by them down the overhanging precipice.

"Liftinant!" exclaimed Sweeny, "thim naygurs up there is washin' their dirty hides an' pourin' the suds down on us."

"It's the rain, Sweeny. There's a shower on the plateau above."

"The rain, is it? Thin all nate people in that counthry must stand in great nade of ombrellys."

The scene was more marvellous than ever. Not a drop of rain fell in the river; the immense facade opposite them was as dry as a skull; yet here was this muddy cataract. It fell for half an hour, scarcely so much as spattering them in their recess, but plunging over them into the torrent beneath. By the time it ceased they had eaten their supper of hard bread and harder beef, and lighted their pipes to allay their thirst. There was a laying of plans to regain the river to-morrow, a grave calculation as to how long their provisions would last, and in general much talk about their chances.

"Not a shine of a lookout for gittin' back to the Casa?" queried Captain Glover. "Knowed it," he added, when the lieutenant sadly shook his head.

"Fool for talkin' 'bout it. How 'bout reachin' the trail to the Moqui country?"

"I have been thinking of it all day," said Thurstane. "We must give it up.

Every one of the branch canons on the other bank trends wrong. We couldn't cross them; we should have to follow them; it's an impa.s.sable h.e.l.l of a country. We might by bare chance reach the Moqui pueblos; but the probability is that we should die in the desert of thirst. We shall have to run the river. Perhaps we shall have to run the Colorado too. If so, we had better keep on to Diamond creek, and from there push by land to Cactus Pa.s.s. Cactus Pa.s.s is on the trail, and we may meet emigrants there. I don't know what better to suggest."

"Dessay it's a tiptop idee," a.s.sented Glover cheeringly. "Anyhow, if we take on down the river, it seems like follyin' the guidings of Providence."

In spite of their strange situation and doubtful prospects, the three adventurers slept early and soundly. When they awoke it was daybreak, and after chewing the hardest, dryest, and rawest of breakfasts, they began their preparations to reach the river. To effect this, it was necessary to find a cleft in the ledge where they could fasten a cord securely, and below it a footing at the water's edge where they could put their boat together and launch it. It would not do to go far down the canon, for the bed of the stream descended while the shelf retained its level, and the distance between them was already sufficiently alarming. After an anxious search they discovered a bowlder lying in the river beneath the shelf, with a flat surface perfectly suited to their purpose. There, too, was a cleft, but a miserably small one.