ECHO ROCK.
The early morning sun streams warm and rich into the cañon, dispelling the nocturnal chill and making the air delightful beyond expression. We are hurled along between close-shutting crags that are the type of solidity, yet seem to waver and topple at their summits as we gaze at them, cut strongly against the tremulous blue of the sky. Our ears are assaulted by the crashing of iron against iron and steam shrieking at the wind, and by the roar and dashing of enraged and baffled water. The lyric sweetness of the distant hill-picture caught in our backward glance as we entered the gates of the cañon, is gone; the poetry of this scene has the epic dignity and the stirring excitement of a war-story sung on the eve of righteous battle. This is the site and the monument of a struggle between forces such as we have no capacity to comprehend. Take a fragment of this shining rock not so large but that you may lift it, and you will find that studied ingenuity, and the vigorous application of power that men speak of as enormous, are required to break it into smaller pieces. Yet here are masses many hundreds of feet high and wide, that have been riven as I might halve a piece of clay. You may say it was done thus, or so. No matter, the impression of stupendous power remains and imprints itself deeply on the mind. Here for miles we pass between escarpments of rock, a thousand, fifteen hundred—ay, here and there more than two thousand feet high. This is not a valley between mountains with sloping sides slowly worn away. Here are vertical exposures that fit together like mortise and tenon; facing cliffs that might be shut against one another so tightly that almost no crevice would remain. To view this mighty chasm thoughtfully, is to receive a revelation of the immeasurable power pent up in the elements whose equilibrium alone forms and preserves our globe; and if we call it “awful,” the word conveys not so much a dread of any harm that might happen to us there, as the vague and timorous appreciation of the dormant strength under our feet. If the gods we call dynamic can rive a pathway for a river through twenty miles of solid granite, of what use is any human safeguard against their anger?
But away with these serious thoughts! The cliffs are founded in unknown depths it is true, but their heads soar into the sunlight, and break into forms not too great for us to grasp. Straight from the liquid emerald frosted with foam which flecks their base—straight as a plummet’s line, and polished like the jasper gates of the Eternal city, rise these walls of echoing granite to their dizzy battlements. Here and there a promontory stands as a buttress; here and there a protruding crag overhangs like a watch-tower on a castle-wall; anon you may fancy a monstrous profile graven in the angle of some cliff,—a gigantic Hermes rudely fashioned. In one part of the cañon where the cliffs are highest, measuring three thousand feet from the railway track to the crown of their haughty heads, faces of the red granite, hundreds of feet square, have been left by a split occurring along a natural cleavage-line; and these are now flat as a mirror and almost as smooth. On the other hand, you may see places where the rocks rise, not solid, sheer and smooth, but so crumpled and contorted that the partition-lines, instead of running at right angles, are curved, twisted and snarled in the most intricate manner, showing that violent and conflicting agitations of the rock must have occurred there at a time when the whole mass was heated to plasticity. In another place, the cliff on the southern side breaks down and slopes back in a series of interrupted and irregular terraces, every ledge and cranny having a shapely tree; while not far away another part of the long escarpment, the rocky layers, turned almost on edge, have been somewhat bent and broken, so that they lie in imbricated tiers upon the convex slopes, as if placed there shingle-fashion.
Just opposite, a stream whose source is invisible has etched itself a notched pathway from the heights above. It plunges down in headlong haste until there comes a time when there is no longer rock for it to flow upon, and it flings itself out into the quiet air, to be blown aside and made rainbows of, to paint upon the circling red cliffs a wondrous picture in flashing white, and then to fall with soft sibilancy into the river. The river has no chance to do so brave a thing as this leap of Chippeta falls from the lofty notch; but seeing a roughened and broken place ahead where the fallen bowlders have raised a barrier, it goes at it with a rush and hurls its plumes of foam high overhead, as, with swirl and tumult, and a swift shooting forth of eddies held far under its snowy breast, it bursts through and over the obstacle and sweeps on, conqueror to the last.
In the very center of the cañon, where its bulwarks are most lofty and precipitous, unbroken cliffs rising two thousand feet without a break, and shadowed by overhanging cornices,—just here stands the most striking buttress and pinnacle of them all,—Currecanti Needle. It is a conical tower standing out somewhat beyond the line of the wall, from which it is separated (so that from some points of view it looks wholly isolate,) on one side by a deep gash, and on the other by one of those narrow side-cañons which in the western part of the gorge occur every mile or two. These ravines are filled with trees and make a green setting for this massive monolith of pink stone whose diminishing apex ends in a leaning spire that seems to trace its march upon the sweeping clouds.
It was in the recesses of the rift beside Currecanti Needle, says a tradition which at least is poetic, that the red men used to light the midnight council-fires around which they discussed their plans of battle. Though judgment may refuse the fact, fancy likes to revel in such a scene as that council-fire would have made, deep in the arms of the rocky defile. How the fitful flashes of the pungent cedar-flame would have driven back the lurking darkness that pressed upon it from all sides! How, now and then starting up, the blaze-light would sally forth and suddenly disclose some captive of the gloom rescued from oblivion—perhaps a mossy bowlder, an aged juniper, a ghostly cottonwood stump, or a ledge of sleeping blossoms! How the bright and polished rocks would be re-reddened and sparkle at their angles under the glancing light; while the pretty soprano of the stream and the deep bass of the river’s roar sang a duet to the narrow line of stars that could peep down between the cañon walls! Surely the time and place were suitable for planning the lurid warfare of a savage race; and as these untamed men, their muscular limbs and revengeful faces, disclosed uncertainly, like the creatures of a flitting fantasy, in the red firelight, enacted with terrifying gestures the fierce future of their plotting, a spectator might well think himself with fiends,
“On Night’s plutonian shore,”
or else discard the whole picture as only the fantastic scenery of some disordered dream.
Opposite Currecanti Needle and cañon stand some very remarkable rocks, underneath the greatest of which the train passes. Then there is a long bridge to cross where the river bends a little; and perhaps the echoing chasm will be filled with the hoarsely repeated scream of a warning whistle. And so, past wonder after wonder, Pelion upon Ossa, buried in a huge rocky prison, yet always in the full sunlight, you suddenly swing round a sharp corner, leaving the Gunnison to go on through ten miles more of cañon, and crashing noisily through the zigzag cañon of the Cimmaron, which is so very narrow and dark it deserves no better name than crevice, quickly emerge into daylight and a busy station.
Thus I have tried to give the reader some trifling indication of what he may expect to see during his hour in the heart of the “Black” cañon, which is not black at all but the sunniest of places. I cannot understand how the name ever came to be applied to it. No Kobolds delving in darkness would make it their home; but rather troops of Oreades, darting down the swift green shutes of water between the spume-wet bowlders, dancing in the creamy eddies, struggling hand over hand up the lace ladders of Chippeta Falls, to tumble headlong down again, making the prismatic foam resound with the soft tinkling of their merry laughter. All the Sprites of the cañon are beings of brightness and joy. The place is full of gayety.