To say that the vision here is grand, awe-inspiring, painfully impressive or memorable, falls short of the truth in each case. It is too much to take in at once, and we were glad to pause again for a little brain-rest at a telegraph station, hung almost like a bird’s nest among the rocks,—to grow used by degrees to the stupendous picture spread before us. We were so high that not only the bottom of the valley, where the silver ribbon of the Los Pinos trailed in and out among the trees, and underneath the headlands, but even the wooded tops of the further rounded hills were below us, and we could count the dim, distant peaks in New Mexico.
Six miles ahead lay the cañon of which we had heard so much,—the Toltec Gorge, whose praises could not be overdrawn. Evidently his majesty had entrenched himself in glories beside which any ordinary monarch would lose his magnificence. Was this king of cañons really so great he could afford to risk all rivalry? Here, on the left, what noble martello-tower of native lava is that which stands undizzied on the very brink of the precipice? I should like to roll it off, and watch it cut a swath through that puny forest down there, and dam up the whole stream with its huge breadth. How these passages of spongy rock resound as our engine drags the long train we have again mounted through their lofty portals! How narrow apparently are these curved and smooth embankments that carry us across the ravines, and how spidery look the firmly-braced bridges that span the torrents! All the way the road-bed is heaped up or dug out artificially. It is merely a shelf near the summit. It hugs the wall like a chamois-stalker, creeping stealthily out to the end of and around each projecting spur; it explores every in-bending gulch, boldly strides across the water channels, and walks undismayed upon the utmost verge, where rough cliffs overhang it, and the gulf sinks away hundreds of feet beneath.
In the most secluded nook of the mountains we come upon Phantom Curve, with its company of isolated rocks, made of stuff so hard as to have stood upright, tall, grotesque, and sunburned, beside the pigmy firs and cowering boulders with which they are surrounded. Miles away you can trace these black pinnacles, like sentinels, mid-way up the slopes; but here at hand they fill the eye, and in their fantastic resemblance to human shapes and things we know in miniature, seem to us crumbled images of the days when there were giants, and men of Titanic mold set up mementoes of their brawny heroes,—
“Achaian statues in a world so rich!”
Phantoms, they are called, and the statuesque shadows they cast, moving mysteriously along the white bluffs, as the sun declines, are uncanny and ghost-like, perhaps; but the brown, rough, grandly grouping monoliths of lava themselves, are no more phantoms than are the pyramids of Sahara, and beside them the Theban monuments of the mighty Rameses would sink into insignificance.
Winding along the slender track, among these solemn forms, we approach the gorge, the vastly seamed and wrinkled face of whose opposite wall confronts us under the frown of an intense shade,—unused to the light from all eternity; but on this, the sunny side, a rosy pile, lifts its massive head proudly far above us, its square, fearless forehead,—
“Fronting heaven’s splendor,
Strong and full and clear.”
How should we pass it? On the right stood the solid palisade of the sierra, rising unbroken to the ultimate heights; on the left the gulf, its sides more and more nearly vertical, more and more terrible in their armature of splintered ledges and pike-pointed tree-tops,—more often breaking away into perpendicular cliffs, whence we could hurl a pebble, or ourselves, into the mad torrent easily seen but too far below to be heard; and as we draw nearer, the rosy crags rise higher and more distinct across our path. We turn a curve in the track, the cars leaning toward the inside, as if they, too, retreated from the look down into that “vasty deep,” and lo! a gateway tunneled through,—the barrier is conquered!