Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of the cañon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible. Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again, where it was entered by minor cañons, it became a breach through crowded pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries. Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and elevations, which would have been monstrous in other landscapes, were here but minor decorations.

Something like half of the strata with which earth is sheathed has been cut through by the Colorado, beginning at the top of the groove with hundreds of feet of limestone, and closing at the bottom with a thousand feet of granite. Here, too, as in many other wonder-spots of the American desert, nature's sculpture is rivalled by her painting. Bluish-gray limestone, containing corals; mottled limestone, charged with slates, flint, and chalcedony; red, brown, and blue limestone, mixed with red, green, and yellow shales; sandstone of all tints, white, brown, ochry, dark red, speckled and foliated; coarse silicious sandstone, and red quartzose sandstone beautifully veined with purple; layers of conglomerate, of many colored shales, argillaceous iron, and black oxide manganese; massive black and white granite, traversed by streaks of quartz and of red sienite; coarse red felspathic granite, mixed with large plates of silver mica; such is the masonry and such the frescoing.

Through this marvellous museum our three spectators wandered in hourly peril of death. The Afreets of the waters and the Afreets of the rocks, guarding the gateway which they had jointly builded, waged incessant warfare with the intruders. Although the current ran five miles an hour, it was a lucky day when the boat made forty miles. Every evening the travellers must find a beach or shelf where they could haul up for the night. Darkness covered destruction, and light exposed dangers. The bubble-like nature of the boat afforded at once a possibility of easy advance and of instantaneous foundering. Every hour that it floated was a miracle, and so they grimly and patiently understood it.

A few days in the cañon changed the countenances of these men. They looked like veterans of many battles. There was no bravado in their faces. The expression which lived there was a resigned, suffering, stubborn courage. It was the "silent berserker rage" which Carlyle praises. It was the speechless endurance which you see in portraits of the Great Frederick, Wellington, and Grant.

They relieved each other. The bow was guard duty; the steering was light duty; the midships off duty. It must be understood that, the great danger being sunken rocks, one man always crouched in the bow, with a paddle plunged below the surface, feeling for ambushes of the stony bushwhackers. Occasionally all three had to labor, jumping into shallows, lifting the boat over beds of pebbles, perhaps lightening it of arms and provisions, perhaps carrying all ashore to seek a portage.

"It's the best canew 'n' the wust canew I ever see for sech a voyage," observed Glover. "Navigatin' in it puts me in mind 'f angels settin' on a cloud. The cloud can go anywhere; but what if ye should slump through?"

"Och! ye're a heretic, 'n' don't belave angels can fly," put in Sweeny.

"Can't ye talk without takin' out yer paddle?" called Glover. "Mind yer soundings."

Glover was at the helm just then, while Sweeny was at the bow. Thurstane, sitting cross-legged on the light wooden flooring of the boat, was entering topographical observations in his journal. Hearing the skipper's warning, he looked up sharply; but both the call and the glance came too late to prevent a catastrophe. Just in that instant the boat caught against some obstacle, turned slowly around before the push of the current, swung loose with a jerk and floated on, the water bubbling through the flooring. A hole had been torn in the canvas, and the cockle-shell was foundering.

"Sound!" shouted Thurstane to Sweeny; then, turning to Glover, "Haul up the Grizzly!"