At their feet was the Colorado, a broad rush of liquid porphyry, swift and pitiless. By its color and its air of stoical cruelty it put one in mind of the red race of America, from whose desert mountains it came and through whose wildernesses it hurried. On the other side of this grim current rose precipices five thousand feet high, stretching to right and left as far as the eye could pierce. Certainly never before did shipwrecked men gaze upon such imprisoning immensity and inhospitable sterility.
Directly opposite them was horrible magnificence. The face of the fronting rampart was gashed a mile deep by the gorge of a subsidiary cañon. The fissure was not a clean one, with even sides. The strata had been torn, ground, and tattered by the river, which had first raged over them and then through them. It was a Petra of ruins, painted with all stony colors, and sculptured into a million outlines. On one of the boldest abutments of the ravine perched an enchanted castle with towers and spires hundreds of feet in height. Opposite, but further up the gap, rose a rounded mountain-head of solid sandstone and limestone. Still higher and more retired, towering as if to look into the distant cañon of the Colorado, ran the enormous terrace of one of the loftier plateaus, its broad, bald forehead wrinkled with furrows that had once held cataracts. But language has no charm which can master these sublimities and horrors. It stammers; it repeats the same words over and over; it can only begin to tell the monstrous truth.
"Looks like we was in our grave," sighed Glover.
"Liftinant," jerked out Sweeny, "I'm thinkin' we're dead. We ain't livin', Liftinant. We've been buried. We've no business trying to walk."
Thurstane had the same sense of profound depression; but he called up his courage and sought to cheer his comrades.
"We must do our best to come to life," he said. "Mr. Glover, can nothing be done with the boat?"
"Can't fix it," replied the skipper, fingering the ragged hole. "Nothin' to patch it with."
"There are the bearskins," suggested Thurstane.
Glover slapped his thigh, got up, danced a double-shuffle, and sat down again to consider his job. After a full minute Sweeny caught the idea also and set up a haw-haw of exultant laughter, which brought back echoes from the other side of the cañon, as if a thousand Paddies were holding revel there.
"Oh! yees may laugh," retorted Sweeny, "but yees can't laugh us out av it."