Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

Now came a long descent, avoiding precipices and impracticable slopes, winding from one stony foot-hill to another, until the party reached what had seemed a plain. It was a plain because it was amid mountains; a plain consisting of rolls, ridges, ravines, and gullies; a plain with hardly an acre of level land. All day they journeyed through its savage interstices and struggled with its monstrosities of trap and sandstone. Twice they halted in narrow valleys, where a little loam had collected and a little moisture had been retained, affording meagre sustenance to some thin grass and scattered bushes. The animals browsed, but there was nothing for them to drink, and all began to suffer with thirst.

It was seven in the evening, and the sun had already gone down behind the sullen barrier of a gigantic plateau, when they reached the mouth of the cañon which had once contained a river, and discovered by the merest accident that it still treasured a shallow pool of stagnant water. The fevered mules plunged in headlong and drank greedily; the riders were perforce obliged to slake their thirst after them. There was a hastily eaten supper, and then came the only luxury or even comfort of the day, the sound and delicious sleep of great weariness.

Repose, however, was not for all, inasmuch as Thurstane had reorganized his system of guard duty, and seven of the party had to stand sentry. It was Coronado's tour; he had chosen to take his watch at the start; there would be three nights on this stretch, and the first would be the easiest. He was tired, for he had been fourteen hours in the saddle, although the distance covered was only forty miles. But much as he craved rest, he kept awake until midnight, now walking up and down, and now smoking his eternal cigarito.

There was a vast deal to remember, to plan, to hope for, to dread, and to hate. Once he sat down beside the unconscious Thurstane, and meditated shooting him through the head as he lay, and so making an end of that obstacle. But he immediately put this idea aside as a frenzy, generated by the fever of fatigue and sleeplessness. A dozen times he was assaulted by a lazy or cowardly temptation to give up the chances of the desert, push back to the Bernalillo route, leave everything to fortune, and take disappointment meekly if it should come. When the noon of night arrived, he had decided upon nothing but to blunder ahead by sheer force of momentum, as if he had been a rolling bowlder instead of a clever, resolute Garcia Coronado.

The truth is, that his circumstances were too mighty for him. He had launched them, but he could not steer them as he would, and they were carrying him he knew not whither. At one o'clock he awoke Texas Smith, who was now his sergeant of the guard; but instead of enjoining some instant atrocity upon him, as he had more than once that night purposed, he merely passed the ordinary instructions of the watch; then, rolling himself in his blankets, he fell asleep as quickly and calmly as an infant.

At daybreak commenced another struggle with the desert. It was still sixty miles to the San Juan, over a series of savage sandstone plateaux, said to be entirely destitute of water. If the animals could not accomplish the distance in two days, it seemed as if the party must perish. Coronado went at his work, so to speak, head foremost and with his hat over his eyes. Nevertheless, when it came to the details of his mad enterprise, he managed them admirably. He was energetic, indefatigable, courageous, cheerful. All day he was hurrying the cavalcade, and yet watching its ability to endure. His "Forward, forward," alternated with his "Carefully, carefully." Now "Adelante" and now "Con juicio"

About two in the afternoon they reached a little nook of sparse grass, which the beasts gnawed perfectly bare in half an hour. No water; the horses were uselessly jaded in searching for it; beds of trap and gullies of ancient rivers were explored in vain; the horrible rocky wilderness was as dry as a bone. Meanwhile, the fatigue of scrambling and stumbling thus far had been enormous. It had been necessary to ascend plateau after plateau by sinuous and crumbling ledges, which at a distance looked impracticable to goats. More than once, in face of some beetling precipice, or on the brink of some gaping chasm, it seemed as if the journey had come to an end. Long detours had to be made in order to connect points which were only separated by slight intervals. The whole region was seamed by the jagged zigzags of cañons worn by rivers which had flowed for thousands of years, and then for thousands of years more had been non-existent. If, at the commencement of one of these mighty grooves, you took the wrong side, you could not regain the trail without returning to the point of error, for crossing was impossible.

A trail there was. It is by this route that the Utes and Payoches of the Colorado come to trade with the Moquis or to plunder them. But, as may be supposed, it is a journey which is not often made even by savages; and the cavalcade, throughout the whole of its desperate push, did not meet a human being. Amid the monstrous expanse of uninhabited rock it seemed lost beyond assistance, forsaken and cast out by mankind, doomed to a death which was to have no spectator. Could you have seen it, you would have thought of a train of ants endeavoring to cross a quarry; and you would have judged that the struggle could only end in starvation, or in some swifter destruction.

The most desperate venture of the travellers was amid the wrecks of an extinct volcano. It seemed here as if the genius of fire had striven to outdo the grotesque extravagances of the genii of the waters. Crags, towers, and pinnacles of porphyry were mingled with huge convoluted masses of light brown trachyte, of tufa either pure white or white veined with crimson, of black and gray columnar basalts, of red, orange, green, and black scoria, with adornments of obsidian, amygdaloids, rosettes of quartz crystal and opalescent chalcedony. A thousand stony needles lifted their ragged points as if to defy the lightning. The only vegetation was a spiny cactus, clinging closely to the rocks, wearing their grayish and yellowish colors, lending no verdure to the scene, and harmonizing with its thorny inhospitality.

As the travellers gazed on this wilderness of scorched summits, glittering in the blazing sunlight, and yet drawing from it no life—as stark, still, unsympathizing, and cruel as death—they seemed to themselves to be out of the sweet world of God, and to be in the power of malignant genii and demons. The imagination cannot realize the feeling of depression which comes upon one who finds himself imprisoned in such a landscape. Like uttermost pain, or like the extremity of despair, it must be felt in order to be known.