The valley of Arcana

by Arthur Preston Hankins

The branch cañon was rock-tenoned and perilously steep, though mercifully dry for a mile above its mouth. It was, said Charmian, the most outspoken cañon in its querulous complaints over their trespassing that they had as yet encountered. It seemed that nature had designed it as the closest attempt to an impossible approach to what was beyond as lay within her power. Into its V bottom she had in a fit of anger hurled immense boulders from the heights above. She had uptilted in her tantrum huge strata of leaflike stone whose edges were sharp as a butcher’s cleaver. Then, out to make a night of it, she had poured rubble from the size of an egg to that of a muskmelon down the reaching slopes, wildly mirthful as a miser raining his shekels from bags to glittering heaps on the table-top. These rubble slides were sometimes half a mile in length—nothing but a slanted sea of round, smooth stones of reddish hue, with not a grain of soil or one single gasping blade of vegetation. Across these slides the wanderers laboured heavily, for the stones, always eager to continue their interrupted rush into the cañon, gave under their feet like dough; often slid under them, carrying them along on the crest of a new slide; and, thus releasing the pressure, caused slides above them which threatened to swoop down and engulf them or mangle their arms and legs; threw them headlong on occasion; twisted their ankles; endangered every bone; made progress a nightmare of apprehensions by clutching their feet at every step, as when the dream-tortured victim tries to flee from some murderous phantom and terror palsies his legs. Once Shonto pitched headlong as the rubble sank under his feet like breaking ice. The break started a slide above him, which extended upward and upward to the lip of the cañon until their ears were filled with the deafening roar of a far-reaching avalanche. Large stones were pushed upward above the mass, and, released, came bounding down alone over the top of the sliding sea, gaining momentum at every leap, living devils of menace.

For a brief space the two were bewildered, the doctor the more so because his head had struck a rock in falling and left him dazed. Then Charmian screamed, and he struggled up and ploughed a way to her side. Almost before they could plan escape the vanguard of the great slide was rushing past them and piling up about their ankles.

“The other side!” shouted the doctor.

He grasped her hand and together they plunged recklessly toward the V bottom of the cañon. It was no longer dry, and this feature had forced them to traverse the rubble, for the opposite wall was all but perpendicular, with overhanging crags. There was no footing. Every frantic step landed them on top of a rolling stone or in the midst of a nest of them. Their ankles turned; they were pitched drunkenly from right to left, thrown to their knees, carried downward in a sitting posture, sometimes backward. The increasing roar was terrifying; a tidal wave of reddish stones was vomited at them—a charging army pursuing them, its skirmish line already heckling them, its cannon balls pounding down from the artillery in the rear.

Charmian pitched forward; would have sprawled on her face upon the wriggling mass of stones had the doctor lost his crushing grip on her hand. Her right arm was almost jerked from its socket as their arms straightened between them and the doctor held on. She thought of her girlhood game of “crack the whip,” when she had been the “snapper” at the tail end of the line and had absorbed the greatest part of the dizzying shock. Next moment she felt herself swept up into his arms, pack and all; and then—though only Heaven knows how he did it—the man pitched with his burden into the cañon, lunged through the water, and started to climb the wall on the opposite side.

Here she struggled free. “I’m all right,” she panted. “I can climb. Oh, hurry!”

Upwards they struggled, grasping jutting stones and the roots of bushes. Into the cañon below them poured the avalanche of stones with the clatter of a billion dice. They struggled on for fifty feet or more, then the girl dropped in helpless exhaustion; and Shonto, faring little better, threw himself down beside her.

“We’re safe,” he gulped. “Just—just rest.”

Gradually the roar subsided while they lay there gasping for the air that seemed to be denied them. Only an occasional angry snarl came from some section of the slide that tried to renew the wild dervish dance of destruction. Then all sounds ceased, and the beleaguered travellers sat up and gazed at the opposite side of the cañon. Everything looked as it had looked before the doctor fell, except that the bottom of the cañon was covered with rubble to a depth of maybe twenty feet. The freshets of a hundred springs to come would carry these on down towards the floor of the mother cañon below, and all would seem to be as it had been for centuries past until some leaping deer or prowling cougar or skulking coyote passed that way and started another slide.

“Gosh!” breathed Charmian. “Ain’t nature wonderful! Thanks for the lift, dear old thing. Well, who’s scared? Where do we go from here?”