"Do ye think Godamighty made thim paple?" inquired Sweeny.
"Reckon so," replied Glover.
"I don't belave it," said Sweeny. "He'd be in more rispactable bizniss. It's me opinyin the divil made um for a joke on the rest av us. An' it's me opinyin he made this whole counthry for the same rayson."
"The priest'll tell ye God made all men, Sweeny."
"They ain't min at all. Thim crachurs ain't min. They're nagurs, an' a mighty poor kind at that. I hate um. I wish they was all dead. I've kilt some av um, an' I'm goin' to kill slathers more, God willin'. I belave it's part av the bizniss av white min to finish off the nagurs."
Profound and potent sentiment of race antipathy! The contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages. It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has entitled "the survival of the fittest," and Darwin, "natural selection."
The party continued to ascend the cañon. At short intervals branch cañons exhibited arid and precipitous gorges, more and more gloomy with twilight. It was impossible to choose between one and another. The travellers could never see three hundred yards in advance. To right and left they were hemmed in by walls fifteen hundred feet in height. Only one thing was certain: these altitudes were gradually diminishing; and hence they knew that they were mounting the plateau. At last, four hours after leaving Diamond Creek, wearied to the marrow with incessant toil, they halted by a little spring, stretched themselves on a scrap of starveling grass, and chewed their meagre, musty supper.
The scenery here was unearthly. Barring the bit of turf and a few willows which had got lost in the desert, there was not a tint of verdure. To right and left rose two huge and steep slopes of eroded and ragged rocks, tortured into every conceivable form of jag, spire, pinnacle, and imagery. In general the figures were grotesque; it seemed as if the misshapen gods of India and of China and of barbarous lands had gathered there; as if this were a place of banishment and punishment for the fallen idols of all idolatries. Above this coliseum of monstrosities rose a long line of sharp, jagged needles, like a vast chevaux-de-frise, forbidding escape. Still higher, lighted even yet by the setting sun, towered five cones of vast proportions. Then came cliffs capped by shatters of tableland, and then the long, even, gleaming ledge of the final plateau.
Locked in this bedlam of crazed strata, unable to see or guess a way out of it, the wanderers fell asleep. There was no setting of guards; they trusted to the desert as a sentinel.
At daylight the blind and wearisome climbing recommenced. Occasionally they found patches of thin turf and clumps of dwarf cedars struggling with the rocky waste. These bits of greenery were not the harbingers of a new empire of vegetation, but the remnants of one whose glory had vanished ages ago, swept away by a vandalism of waters. Gradually the cañon dwindled to a ravine, narrow, sinuous, walled in by stony steeps or slopes, and interlocking continually with other similar chasms. A creek, which followed the chasm, appeared and disappeared at intervals of a mile or so, as if horrified at the face of nature and anxious to hide from it in subterranean recesses.