The River and I Part 2

And in the end, when all broken lights have blended again with the Source Light, I'm not so sure that rainbows will seem less important than rows and rows of arc lights and cl.u.s.ters and cl.u.s.ters of incandescent globes. Are you? I can contract an indefinable sort of heartache from the blue sputter of a city light that snuffs out moon and stars for tired scurrying folks: but the opalescent mist-drift of the Rainbow Falls wove heavens for me in its sheen, and through its whirlwind rifts and crystal flaws, far reaches opened up with all the heart's desire at the other end. You shut your eyes with that thunder in your ears and that gusty mist on your face, and you see it very plainly--more plainly than ever so many arc lights could make you see it--the ultimate meaning of things. To be sure, when you open your eyes again, it's all gone--the storm-flung rainbows seem to hide it again.

A mile below, we came upon the Crooked Falls of twenty feet. Leaving the left bank and running almost parallel with it for some three hundred yards, then turning and making a horseshoe, and returning to the right bank almost opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly a mile in length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one, also, does nothing at all, and in a beautifully irregular way. Somehow it made me think of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon, swinging out into the open parched country. We knew all this turbulence to be merely the river's bow before the great stunt.

As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull m.u.f.fled thunders grew up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud!

For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders increased--like the undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were approaching the Great Falls of the Missouri. There were no sign posts in that lonesome tract; no one of whom to ask the way. Little did we need direction. The voice of thunder crying in the desert led us surely.

A half-hour more of clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up sun-baked watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged slope of a bluff; and soon we stood upon a rocky ledge with the thunders beneath us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below me--straight down as a pebble drops--a watery Inferno raged, and far-flung whirlwinds all but exhausted with the dizzy upward reach, whisked cool, invisible mops of mist across my face.

Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent crest--shimmering with the changing colors of a peac.o.c.k's back--smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREAT FALLS FROM CLIFF ABOVE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREAT FALLS FROM THE FRONT.]

I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound--and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a gra.s.shopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with only the stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to behold. Thundering out its message into the waste places, careless of audiences--like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-Bard singing--as most of them do--to empty benches! And it had been doing that ten thousand thousand years, and would do so for ten thousand thousand more, and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't much difference between really tremendous things--Homer or waterfalls or thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things happen to be big.

I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles when Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive line: "Lord! what a waste of power!"

There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would have enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have liked to have Sh.e.l.ley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What is the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many horse-power did Sh.e.l.ley fling into the creation of his _West Wind_? How many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke?

Something may be left to the imagination!

We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense of discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men who had ever been there: that was the most gripping thing about it.

Aloof, stupendous, terriffic, staggering in the intensity of its wild beauty, you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a gla.s.s of beer within ten miles of its far-flung thunders. For twentieth century America, that is doing rather well!

Skirting the slippery rocks at the lip of the mad flood, we swung ourselves about a ledge, dripping with the cool mist-drift; descended to the level of the lower basin, where a soaking fog made us shiver; pushed through a dripping, oozing, autumnal sort of twilight, and came out again into the beat of the desert sun, to look squarely into the face of the giant.

A hawk wheeled and swooped and floated far up in the dazzling air.

Somehow that hawk seemed to make the lonely place doubly lonely. Did you ever notice how a lone coyote on a snow-heaped prairie gives you a heartache, whereas the empty waste would only have exhilarated you?

Always, it seemed, that veering hawk had hung there, and would hang so always--outliving the rising of suns and the drifting of stars and the visits of the moon.

A vague sense of grief came over me at the thought of all this eternal restlessness, this turbulent fixity; and, after all, it seemed much greater to be even a very little man, living largely, dying, somehow, into something big and new; than to be this Promethean sort of thing, a giant waterfall in a waste.

I have known men who felt dwarfed in the presence of vast and awful things. I never felt bigger than when I first looked upon the ocean. The skyward lift of a mountain peak makes me feel very, very tall. And when a thunderstorm comes down upon the world out of the northwest, with jagged blades of fire ripping up the black bellies of the clouds, I know all about the heart of Attila and the Vikings and tigers and Alexander the Great! So I think I grew a bit out there talking to that water-giant who does nothing at all--not even a vaudeville stunt--and does it so masterfully.

By and by they'll build a hotel in the flat at the edge of the lower basin; plant prim flowers in very prim beds; and rob you on the genteel European plan. Comfortably sitting in a willow chair on the broad veranda, one will read the signs on those cliffs--all about the best shoes to wear, and what particular pill of all the pills that be, should be taken for that ailing kidney. But it will not be I who shall sit in that willow chair on that broad, as yet unbuilt, veranda.

The sun was glinting at the rim of the cliffs, and the place of awe and thunders was slowly filling with shadow. We found a steep trail, inaccessible for vehicles, leading upward in the direction of Benton. It was getting that time of day when even a sentimentalist wants a beefsteak, especially if he has hiked over dusty scorching trails and scrambled over rocks all day.

Some kind man back in the town, with a fund of that most useless article, information, had told us of a place called Goodale, theoretically existing on the Great Northern Railroad between Great Falls and Benton. We had provided only for luncheon, trusting to fate and Goodale for supper.

Goodale! A truly beautiful name! No doubt in some miraculous way the character of the country changed suddenly just before you got there merely to justify the name. Surely no one would have the temerity to conjure up so beautiful a name for a desert town. Yet, half unwillingly, I thought of a little place I once visited--against my will, since the brakeman put me off there--by the name of Forest City. I remembered with misgivings how there wasn't a tree within something like four hundred miles. But I pushed that memory aside as a lying prophet. I believed in Goodale and beefsteak. Goodale would be a neat, quiet little town, set snugly in a verdant valley. We would come into it by starlight--down a careless gypsying sort of country road; and there would be the sound of a dear little trickling bickering cool stream out in the shadows of the trees fringing the approach to Goodale. And we'd pa.s.s pretty little cottages with vines growing over the doors, and hollyhocks peeping over the fences, and cheerful lights in the windows.

Goodale! And then, right in the middle of the town (no, _village_--the word is cosier somehow)--right in the middle of the village there would be a big restaurant, with such alluring scents of beefsteak all about it.

I set the pace up that trail. It was a swinging, loose, cavalry-horse sort of pace--the kind that rubs the blue off the distance and paints the back trail gray. Goodale was a sort of Mecca. I thought of it with something like a religious awe. How far was Goodale, would you suppose?

Not far, certainly, once we found the railroad.

We made the last steep climb breathlessly, and came out on the level. A great, monotonous, heartachy prairie lay before us--utterly featureless in the twilight. Far off across the scabby land a thin black line swept out of the dusk into the dusk--straight as a crow's flight. It was the railroad. We made a cross-cut for it, tumbling over gopher holes, plunging through sagebrush, scrambling over gullies that told the incredible tale of torrents having been there once. I ate quant.i.ties of alkali dust and went on believing in Goodale and beefsteak. Beefsteak became one of the princ.i.p.al stations on the Great Northern Railroad, so far as I was concerned personally. That is what you might call the geography of a healthy stomach.

With the falling of the sun the climate of the country had changed. It was no longer blistering. You sat down for a moment and a shiver went up your spine. At noon I thought about all the lime-kilns I had ever met.

Now I could hear the hickory nuts dropping in the crisp silence down in the old Missouri woods.

We struck the railroad and went faster. Since my first experience with railroad ties, I have continued to a.s.sociate them with hunger. I need only look an ordinary railroad tie in the face to contract a wonderful appet.i.te. It works on the principle of a memory system. So, as we put the ties behind us, I increased my order at that restaurant in the sweet little pedestrian's village of Goodale. "A couple of eggs on the side, waiter," I said half audibly to the pet.i.te woman in the white ap.r.o.n who served the tables in the restaurant there. She was very real to me. I could count the rings on her fingers; and when she smiled, I noted that her teeth were very white--doubtless they got that way from eating quant.i.ties and quant.i.ties of thick juicy beefsteak!

The track took a sudden turn ahead. "Around that bend," I said aloud, "lies Goodale." We went faster. We rounded the bend, only to see the dusky, heartachy, barren stretch.

"Railroads," explained I to myself, "have a way of going somewhere; it is one of their peculiarities." No doubt this track had been laid for the express purpose of guiding hungry folks to the hospitable little village. We plunged on for an hour. Meanwhile my orders to the trim little woman in the white ap.r.o.n increased steadily. She smiled broadly but winsomely, showing those charming beefsteak-polished teeth. They shone like a beacon ahead of me, for it was now dark.

Suddenly we came upon a signboard. We went up to it, struck a match, and read breathlessly--"GOODALE."

We looked about us. Goodale was a switch and a box car.

Nothing beside remains,

I quoted,

'round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Alas for the trim little lady with the white teeth and the smile and the beefsteak!

We said bitter things there in that waste about the man with the information. We loaded his memory with anathemas. One cannot eat a signboard, even with so inviting a name upon it. An idea struck me--it seemed a very brilliant one at the moment. I sat down and delivered myself of it to my companions, who also had l.u.s.ted after the flesh-pots.

"We have wronged that man with the information," said I. "He was no ordinary individual; he was a prophet: he simply got his dates mixed. In precisely one hundred years from now, there will be a town on this spot--and a restaurant! Shall we wait?"

They cursed me bitterly. I suspect neither of them is a philosopher.

Thereat I proceeded to eat a thick juicy steak from the T-bone portion of an unborn steer, served by the trim little lady of a hundred years hence, there in that potential village of Goodale. And as I smoked my cigarette, I felt very thankful for all the beautiful things that do not exist.

And I slept that night in the great front bedroom, the ceiling of which is of diamond and turquoise.

CHAPTER III

HALF-WAY TO THE MOON

At last the sinuous yellow road dropped over the bluff rim and, to all appearances, dissolved into the sky--a gray-blue, genius-colored sky.

It was sundown, and this was the end of the trail for us. Beneath the bluff rim lay Benton. We flung ourselves down in the bunch-gra.s.s that whispered dryly in a cool wind fresh from the creeping night-shade. Now that Benton lay beneath us, I was in no hurry to look upon it.

_Fort Benton?_ What a clarion cry that name had been to me! Old men--too old for voyages--had talked about this place; a long time ago, 'way down on the Kansas City docks, I had heard them. How far away it was then!

Reach after reach, bend after bend, grunting, snoring, toiling, sparring over bars, bucking the currents, dodging the snags, went the snub-nosed steamers--brave little steamers!--forging on toward Fort Benton. And it was so very, very far away--half-way to the moon no doubt! St. Louis was indeed very far away. But Fort Benton!----

Well, they spoke of the Fort Benton traffic as "the mountain trade," and I had not then seen a mountain. You could stand on the very tallest building in Kansas City, and you could look and look and never see a mountain. And to think how far the brave little steamers had to go! How _did_ they ever manage to get back?

But the old men on the docks--they had been there and all the way back, perhaps hundreds of times. And they were such heroes! Great paw-like hands they had, toughened with the gripping of cables; eyes that had that way of looking through and far beyond things. (Seamen and plainsmen have it.) And they had such romantic, crinkly, wrinkly, leathery faces.

They got so on the way to Benton and back. And they talked about it--those old men lounging on the docks--because it was so far away and they were so old that they couldn't get there any more.