Moving slowly through a deeply shaded cutting, a sharp outward curve is rounded, and what a vision greets our astonished eyes! The most magnificent of all the cañons of the Rockies! The mountain presents a red granite front, perpendicular for nearly a thousand feet, and midway between top and bottom has been chiseled from the solid rock a long balcony or shelf, just wide enough for the track. From far below comes to our ears the roar of driven waters, and with bated breath we gaze fearfully over the edge, so perilously near, down, down to where a bright green torrent urges its impatient way between walls whose jetty hue no sun-ray relieves. Overhead the beetling precipice towers ominously, as if about to crush the pigmies who had dared to invade its storm-swept breast. In its shadow all is silent, weird and awful.
The opposite side of the cañon, scarcely the toss of a pebble away, rises almost vertically, a smooth, unscalable wall, that gleams like brightly polished bronze, but is striped with upright lines of shadow, so that it recalls Scott’s picture of Melrose Abbey under the harvest-moon:—
“And buttress and buttress alternately
Seemed carved in ebon and ivory.”
Higher up, the wall breaks away into receding hills, on whose grassy and wooded slopes the sunshine plays hide and seek. A little above the gorge we can discern where the track turns to the right and crosses on a long, low trestle, the alcove in the cañon, while in the loftier heights beyond, the verdure-clad mountains are seen rising into shapely cones and coquetting with the fleecy clouds. Such were the elements of the sublime view in the Cañon of the Rio de las Animas Perdidas caught and perpetuated by our Artist.
Beyond the opening the defile again closes into so narrow a compass that the pines and spruces clinging precariously to the cliffs mingle in a dim arch that spans the chasm. Again the train is creeping cautiously along a dizzy brink, while an hundred feet below the pent-up flood is forcing its passage through the unworn and pitilessly hard rocks. The water is still green as emerald, and has the same luminous quiver and transparence of verdancy which the gem possesses. What gives it that vivid color here in this dark recess?—anything but the fact that it is surcharged with the air caught in its turbulence? We can see great nebulæ of submerged bubbles racing by, meteor-like, too swiftly to rise at once to the glassy surface. Niagara, below the Falls, has that same wonderful, deep green tint. Imprison Niagara, or only so much of it as you could span with a stone’s throw; contract its upright, volcanic walls into a crevice sixty feet wide—turn the river up on edge, as it were—and send it down that black, resounding flume, with all the impetus of a twenty-mile race,—then you have an image of this “River of Lost Souls,” in the wildest portion of its marvelous channel.
The building of the railway, for the first mile north of Rockwood, exceeded in its daring any work even in the famous Grand Cañon of the Arkansas. The engineer who had charge of the construction showed the Madame a picture one of his surveyors drew of the manner in which the location was made. Evidently the draughtsman took his observations from the water’s edge, where his vista was between two walls of natural masonry, and was limited by the side of the gorge which bent sharply there. This wall was vertical and smooth, for almost a thousand feet from its base. From that height were seen hanging spider-web-like ropes, down which men, seeming not much larger than ants, were slowly descending, while others (perched upon narrow shelves in the face of the cliffs, or in trifling niches from which their only egress was by the dangling ropes), sighted through their theodolites from one ledge to the other, and directed where to place the dabs of paint indicating the intended roadbed. Similarly suspended, the workmen followed the engineers, drilling holes for blasting, and tumbling down loose fragments, until they had won a foothold for working in a less extraordinary manner. Ten months of steady labor were spent on this cañon-cutting,—months of work on the brink of yawning abysses and in the midst of falling rocks, yet not one serious accident occurred. “Often it seemed as though another hair’s distance or straw’s weight would have sent me headlong over the edge,” said the chief engineer, and no doubt all his subordinates could say the same. The expense attending such construction was of necessity great, the outlay for this single mile aggregating about $140,000.
Crossing the handsome bridge shown in our sketch, the course of the road thereafter is generally on the eastern bank of the stream, although it is recrossed a few times where, by this expedient, expensive excavation could be avoided. The water gradually rises to the level of the track, which is henceforth rarely a rod above it. Often in making a curve, one obtains a charming view up the river, with its gracefully drooping borders of willows and aspens. Everywhere the mountains are close at hand on either side, and a goat could scarcely climb their inaccessible steeps.
Presently a halt is made, and as we alight, such a picture is presented as it may never be our fortune to again behold. The cañon is compressed into a narrow fissure among mountains of supreme height, whose fronts are in unbroken shadow. At the right a waterfall comes leaping down, to join the foam-flecked river. In the foreground great banks of moss sustain gay flowers, while over them nod the stately pines, with swaying vines, keeping time to the fretful murmur of the water. Between and far beyond the clear-cut sky-lines of nearer peaks, The Needles lift their splintered pinnacles into the regions of perpetual snow, wrapped in the gauze of a wondrous atmosphere, and their crests glowing as with a golden crown.
Continuing northward, we speedily enter Elk Park, a little valley in the midst of the range, with sunlit meadows and groups of giant pines. As we turn from the park, a backward glance discloses the subject of our frontispiece,—Garfield Peak,—lifting its symmetrical summit a mile above the track, a peerless landmark among its fellows.