Better days; or, A Millionaire of To-morrow

by Thomas Fitch; Anna M. Fitch

After half an hour’s hard climbing, our adventurer gained this wall and found along its base a natural road, with an ascent of probably three hundred feet to the mile. Slowly plodding his way among the loose rock and débris, which had, during many ages, scaled and fallen from the basalt, he soon reached an opening about sixty feet in width.

Supposing that this might be a cañon or gorge that would furnish a means of ascending the wall, he turned into it. In a little more than a quarter of a mile it came to an abrupt termination. It was a cul de sac, a rift in the wall made in some convulsion of nature. It ascended very slightly, being almost level, and at both sides and at the end the basalt towered for a thousand feet sheer to the summit, without leaving a break upon which even a bird could set its foot. It was now midday, but the rays of the sun did not penetrate to the bottom of this rift, and the atmosphere and light were those of an autumn twilight.

After ascertaining the nature and extent of the gorge, Morning turned, and, plodding through the sand and loose rock to its entrance, resumed his journey along the base of the great wall. The ascent of the little ridge or natural road grew steeper and steeper, until at length the top was reached, and our explorer stood upon the summit of the great basaltic formation, a mile in width and ten miles in length, which forms the southwestern rim or table of the Santa Catalinas. From near the outer edge spread as grand a prospect as was ever vouschafed to the eye of mortal. Tucson, seven thousand feet below and fifteen miles away, seemed almost at the foot of the mountain. To the southeast stretched a narrow, winding ribbon of green, the homes of the Mexicans, who, with their ancestors, have for more than two centuries occupied the valley of the Santa Cruz. Farther yet to the southward the lofty Huachucas towered. Northward a higher peak of the Catalinas cut off the view, but to the southwest broad mesas and billowy hills stretched for more than a hundred and fifty miles, until at the horizon the eye rested upon the blue of the Gulf of California, penciled against an ashen strip of sky.

As Morning gazed in awe and delight, there appeared in the sky, scudding from the south, flecks of cloud, chasing each other like gulls upon an ocean, and remembering that this was the rainy season, and feeling rather than knowing that a storm was about to gather, Morning retraced his steps. He had proceeded on his return to a point about five hundred yards above the mouth of the rift which he had visited on his upward journey, when the rapidly-darkening clouds and big plashes of rain drops warned him that one of the showers customary in that section in August was about to fall.

Such storms are usually of brief duration, but are liable to be exceedingly violent, the water often descending literally in sheets. It would have been impossible for Morning to reach the camp where he had left the animals in time to avoid the storm, and a hollow in the basalt wall—a hollow which almost amounted to a cave—offering just here a complete shelter from the rain, which was approaching from the south, over the top of the wall, he sought the opening, and was soon seated upon a convenient rock, while his vision swept the slope to the cañon a mile below, and thence followed the meanderings of the Rillito until it vanished from sight.

And the clouds grew and darkened. Like black battalions of Afrites summoned by the “thunder drum of heaven,” they trooped from distant mountains and nearer plains to gather upon the summit of the Catalinas. The south wind—now risen to a gale—swooped up the fogs from the distant gulf, and hurried them upon its mighty pinions, shrieking with delight at the burden it bore up to the summit of the basalt, above which it massed them.

Then the demons of the upper ether reached their electric-tipped fingers into the dense black watery masses, and whirled them into a denser circle, whirled them into an hour glass, whose tip was in the heavens and whose base was carried by the giant force thus generated slowly along and just above the top of the great wall.

Whirled in a demon waltz to the music of the shaking crags, yet touching not those peaks, for to touch them would have been destruction, the circling ocean in the air sailed, roaring and shrieking, to the eastward, growing denser and more powerful, and black with the blackness of the nethermost pit, as it journeyed on. At last it reached the blind cañon so lately visited by our explorer. The air—imprisoned between the earth and the clouds—rushed with a tortured yell down the rift in the mountain. The wall of water sank as its support tumbled from beneath it; its base touched the ragged rocky edges of the cleft; the compactness of the fluid mass was broken, and the forces fled and left to its fate the watery monster they had engendered.

Then, with a roar louder than a thousand peals of thunder, with throbs and gaspings like the death rattle of a giant, the waterspout burst, and its vast volume descended into the gorge, down which it seethed with the power of a cataclysm.

Out of the mouth of the cul de sac a torrent issued, or rather a wall of water hundreds of feet in height. Down the mountain side it sped, tearing a channel deep and wide, and crumbling into a thousand cataracts of foam, which spread and submerged the slope. A deep depression or basin on the side of the mountain just southward of the bed of the Rillito deflected the torrent for a few hundred yards, and it rushed into this basin and filled it, and, leaving a small lake as a souvenir of its visit, went roaring down the cañon, which it entered again about a quarter of a mile below the spot where Morning had tethered his mules.