Overland Part 37

"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 b.u.t.tes 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 snowed 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, ind was eaten. During the time required for jerking a quant.i.ty of it, Glover made a boat out of the two hides, sc.r.a.ping 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-sh.e.l.l. 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, pa.s.sed the mouth of Canon 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 canons, 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 t.i.tanic defiles or flanked by Cyclopean _debris_, 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 Canon of the Colorado, the most sublime and terrible waterway of this planet.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Thurstane had strange emotions as he swept into the "caverns measureless to man" of the Great Canon of the Colorado.

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 pa.s.sage; then it had closed behind him forever.

The canon, 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 Canon 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 Canon 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 Canon 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 he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan's Dark Valley and Milton's h.e.l.l, 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 alt.i.tudes 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 canon, 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 pa.s.s 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 silent; 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."