They laughed at our question. It is the standing joke at the Goodfellow ranch. They pointed to the five acre field of level alfalfa, edged with a prosperous vineyard. “You are on the bridge.”
Bewildered, we walked for five minutes to the edge of the little level ranch surrounded by high pinon-covered walls on all sides. Still no bridge. At our feet they showed us a small hole in the ground, a foot deep. Looking through it we saw a steep chasm with a tangle of cactus and trees, and at the very bottom a clear, swift stream.
Unknown years ago some strange explosion had taken place through this tiny vent, creating the powerful arch beneath, which at this point seemed perilously thin, yet supported houses, cattle and men. At a crisis the accidents of Nature, like those of men, crystallize, and thereafter become unalterable. This tiny peep-hole, whim of a casual meeting of gases, would survive a thousand of our descendants. This was only one of a hundred spectacles Arizona was staging at the time. Think what a fuss the San Franciscans made of their little eruption in 1906,—and yet Arizona managed an exposition of fireworks back in the dark ages compared to which San Francisco’s was like a wet firecracker. But Arizona showed poor business judgment in letting all her Grand Canyons, natural bridges and volcanoes erupt before the invention of jitneys, railroads, motion pictures and press agents. Naturally her geologic display attracted no attention, and today you can come upon freaks of nature casually anywhere in the state, of which nobody ever heard.
Even Natural Bridge, the widest of its kind in the world, is unknown to most Arizonans; many have only vaguely heard of it or confuse it with the Rainbow Bridge in Utah. Yet it is the strangest jumble of geologic freaks in any equal area, outside of Yellowstone.
Standing under the arch, so broad and irregularly shaped that at no point can it be photographed to show adequately that it is a bridge, you are really on the ground floor of a four-story apartment of Nature’s building. The first floor is laid with a tumbling brown stream, flecked with white, and tiled with immense porphyry colored boulders of fantastic shapes. Exotic shrubs of tangly cactus, huge spotted eucalyptus, and firs, and myriads of dainty flowers dress the vestibule. Pools and stone tubs sculptured by Father Time invite,—oh, how they invite to bathe! The floor is speckled and flecked with sunlight which filters under the arch. Great rocks seem to float on the stream, mysteriously lighted, like Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. For half a mile you push through stubborn mesquite, wade and leap from rock to stream, finding a picture at every turn.
GREAT ROCKS SEEM TO FLOAT ON THE STREAM, MYSTERIOUSLY LIGHTED,
LIKE BOCKLIN’S ISLE OF THE DEAD.
Then climbing sixty or more perpendicular feet on an amateur ladder, whose stoutness is its only reassuring feature, built by the discoverer of the Bridge, Scotch old Dave Goodfellow, you reach the second floor, devoted to one room apartments hollowed by drippings of age-old streams, and slippery with crusted lime. The cliff is honeycombed with caves in which stalactite and stalagmite meet, resembling twisted cedar trunks. Wolves and coyotes have made their homes here, and even somnolent grizzlies; in the smaller niches on warm spring days one has to take care that one’s fingers do not grasp a twining mass of sluggish rattlesnake. In one of these caves the human rattlesnake, Geronimo, hid for a month in the Apache revolt of the nineties, while the United States scouts scoured Arizona to find him, and a story and a half above, the canny Goodfellow hid in his little one-room cabin, each fearing discovery by the other.
Above this floor is a mezzanine with another nest of caverns. Three sets of ladders riveted to a vertical shelf of rock lead you to the most interesting cave of them all, where the fairy tale comes true of the wizard who had to climb a mountain of glass. Toby knows no fear of aerial heights, so I had to pretend not to. A grandnephew of the elder Goodfellow led us where I hope never to return. We entered through a hole just wide enough to admit our bodies, and barely high enough to stand upright in. Then up a grade of 40 per cent over a limestone surface glassy from age-long accumulations of dripping chemicals, we wriggled flat on our backs, with feet braced against the ceiling to prevent our slipping out of the cave. Only a bat could have felt completely nonchalant under such circumstances. Harry Goodfellow worked himself along swiftly and easily, with an extraordinary hitch, hands and feet braced against the ceiling of the cave. After him, less expertly, we came, using his ankles for ladder rungs, and clinging to them frantically. How I prayed, not altruistically, that his ankles were not weak! My imagination took the wrong moment to visualize his grip failing, and his sudden descent out of the cave and over the cliff, with Toby and me each frantically clinging to an ankle. However we made the climb up safely, but going down was worse. I wonder why human nature never remembers, when it climbs to dizzy heights, that the go-down will be dizzier still.
I daresay I should yet be mid-way down that glass-bottomed cave, with feet barnacled to its ceiling, had I not realized how uncomfortable life would be spent in that position. Therefore I slid,—and jumped, hoping the force of my descent would not bounce me out of the narrow entrance into a clump of cactus sixty feet below. What happened to the others at that moment I did not care.