12. The Road
When he came to the California bank of the Colorado River, Ali halted Ben Akbar and surrendered to complete astonishment. Reason told him he had been this way before, but so drastic were the changes and so little was as he remembered it, that he challenged reason itself. Ali took a deep breath and tried vainly to assure himself that this really was Beale's Crossing where, two years ago and fifty days out of Fort Defiance, the expedition's work had been successfully completed.
Ali and Lieutenant Beale, on Ben Akbar and Sied, had reached the river on the seventeenth of October. They were met by a horde of Indians, all of whom were so deliriously excited at their first sight of camels that any English they might have known was submerged in the shock. Two days later, Ali had proved that camels can swim by swimming Ben Akbar across the Colorado. The rest of the expedition had followed. Some horses and mules, which the Indians promptly retrieved and ate, were drowned. All the camels had crossed safely.
Ali's dazed mind strove to reconcile that scene of the past and this one.
On the opposite bank, where the Indians had grown their corn and melons, covered wagons with canvas tops that billowed in the little wind that stirred were lined up as far as the eye could see. Horses, mules and oxen rested in the traces while awaiting their turn on a ferry that was presently in mid-river, its cargo a wagon and a six-mule team. Adults gossiped and children played about the waiting wagons. There was a barking of dogs, a cackling of fowl, a lowing of cattle, all the noises that accompany a nation on the march.
Transfixed, Ali could not move. Then the spell that gripped him was broken by a shout.
"Hey you! Move that blasted camel!"
Glancing toward the ferry, Ali saw the six mules dancing skittishly and two men trying to quiet them. Ali moved downriver. In some ways, all had changed and in some, nothing had; camels still panicked livestock.
Presently, Ali halted and turned back to watch, appalled by this monster that he had somehow helped to spawn. The road had seemed a good thing, but all the people who would ever use it, or so Ali thought, were not half as many as the multitude awaiting the ferry.
For a while he sat entranced as a wild deer that cannot turn its eyes from some fascinating thing, then his flight was sudden as the deer's when the intriguing but unknown object is abruptly recognized as a dreaded enemy. Wheeling Ben Akbar, Ali rode downriver at top speed. He did not dare look around, and he did not think of slackening the pace until even Ben Akbar could no longer maintain it and slowed of his own accord. Instantly contrite, Ali drew his mount to a halt.