One more glance, one moment of manly, soldierly reflection, enabled

Thurstane to comprehend the fate which was upon him, and to bow to it with
resignation. Turning his back upon the foaming reefs which might the next
instant be his executioners, he stood up in the boat, took off his cap,
and waved a farewell to Clara. He was so unconscious of anything but her
and his parting from her that for some time he did not notice that the
slight craft had narrowly shaved the rocks, that it had barely crawled
into the middle current, and that he was temporarily safe. He kept his
eyes fixed upon the Casa and upon the girl's motionless figure until a
monstrous, sullen precipice slid in between. He was like one who breathes
his last with straining gaze settled on some loved face, parting from
which is worse than death. When he could see her no longer, nor the ruin
which sheltered her, and which suddenly seemed to him a paradise, he
dropped his head between his hands, utterly unmanned.

"'Twon't dew to give it up while we float, Major," said Glover, breveting
the lieutenant by way of cheering him.

"I don't give it up," replied Thurstane; "but I had a duty to do there,
and now I can't do it."

"There's dooties to be 'tended to here, I reckon," suggested Glover.

"They will be done," said the officer, raising his head and settling his
face. "How can we help you?"

"Don't seem to need much help. The river doos the paddlin'; wish it
didn't. No 'casion to send anybody aloft. I'll take a seat in the stern
'n' mind the hellum. Guess that's all they is to be done."

"You dum paddywhack," he presently reopened, "what d'ye break yer paddle
for?"

"I didn't break it," yapped Sweeny indignantly. "It broke itself."

"Well, what d'ye say y' could paddle for, when y' couldn't?"

"I can paddle. I paddled as long as I had anythin' but a sthick."

"Oh, you dum landlubber!" smirked Glover. "What if I should order ye to
the masthead?"

"I wouldn't go," asseverated Sweeny. "I'll moind no man who isn't me
suparior officer. I've moindin' enough to do in the arrmy. I wouldn't go,
onless the liftinint towld me. Thin I'd go."

"Guess y' wouldn't now."

"Yis I wud."

"But they an't no mast."

"I mane if there was one."

This kind of babble Glover kept up for some minutes, with the sole object
of amusing and cheering Thurstane, whose extreme depression surprised and
alarmed him. He knew that the situation was bad, and that it would take
lots of pluck to bring them through it.

"Capm, where d'ye think we're bound?" he presently inquired. "Whereabouts
doos this river come out?"

"It runs into the Colorado of the West, and that runs into the head of the
Gulf of California."

"Californy! Reckon I'll git to the diggins quicker 'n I expected. Goin' at
this rate, we'll make about a hundred 'n' twenty knots a day. What's the
distance to Californy?"

"By the bends of the river it can't be less than twelve hundred miles to
the gulf."

"Whew!" went Glover. "Ten days' sailin'. Wal, smooth water all the way?"

"The San Juan has never been navigated. So far as I know, we are the first
persons who ever launched a boat on it."

"Whew! Why, it's like discoverin' Ameriky. Wal, what d'ye guess about the
water? Any chance 'f its bein' smooth clear through?"

"The descent to the gulf must be two or three thousand feet, perhaps more.
We can hardly fail to find rapids. I shouldn't be astonished by a
cataract."

Glover gave a long whistle and fell into grave meditation. His conclusion
was: "Can't navigate nights, that's a fact. Have to come to anchor. That
makes twenty days on't. Wal, Capm, fust thing is to fish up a bit 'f
driftwood 'n' whittle out 'nother paddle. Want a boat-pole, too, like
thunder. We're awful short 'f spars for a long voyage."

His lively mind had hardly dismissed this subject before he remarked: "Dum
cur'ous that towline breaking. I overhauled every foot on't. I'd a bet my
bottom fo'pence on its drawin' ten ton. Haul in the slack end 'n' let's
hev a peek at it."

The tip of the lariat, which was still attached to the boat, being handed
to him, he examined it minutely, closed his eyes, whistled, and
ejaculated, "Sawed!"

"What?" asked Thurstane.

"Sawed," repeated Glover. "That leather was haggled in tew with a jagged
knife or a sharp flint or suthin 'f that sort. Done a purpose, 's sure 's
I'm a sinner."

Thurstane took the lariat, inspected the breakage carefully, and scowled
with helpless rage.

"That infernal Texan!" he muttered.

"Sho!" said Glover. "That feller? Anythin' agin ye? Wal, Capm, then all
I've got to say is, you come off easy. That feller 'd cut a sleepin' man's
throat. I sh'd say thank God for the riddance. Tell ye I've watched that
cuss. Been blastedly afeard 'f him. Hev so, by George! The further I git
from him the safer I feel."

"Not a nice man to leave _there_" muttered Thurstane, whose anxiety was
precisely not for himself, but for Clara. The young fellow could not be
got to talk much; he was a good deal upset by his calamity. The parting
from Clara was an awful blow; the thought of her dangers made him feel as
if he could jump overboard; and, lurking deep in his soul, there was an
ugly fear that Coronado might now win her. He was furious moreover at
having been tricked, and meditated bedlamite plans of vengeance. For a
time he stared more at the mangled lariat than at the amazing scenery
through which he was gliding.

And yet that scenery, although only a prelude, only an overture to the
transcendent oratorios of landscape which were to follow, was in itself a
horribly sublime creation. Not twenty minutes after the snapping of the
towline the boat had entered one of those stupendous canons which form the
distinguishing characteristic of the great American table-land, and make
it a region unlike any other in the world.

Remember that the canon is a groove chiselled out of rock by a river.
Although a groove, it is never straight for long distances. The river at
its birth was necessarily guided by the hollows of the primal plateau;
moreover, it was tempted to labor along the softest surfaces. Thus the
canon is a sinuous gully, cut down from the hollows of rocky valleys, and
following their courses of descent from mountain-chain toward ocean.

In these channels the waters have chafed, ground, abraded, eroded for
centuries which man cannot number. Like the Afreets of the Arabian Nights,
they have been mighty slaves, subject to a far mightier master. That
potent magician whose lair is in the centre of the earth, and whom men
have vaguely styled the attraction of gravitation, has summoned them
incessantly toward himself. In their struggle to render him obedience,
they have accomplished results which make all the works of man
insignificant by comparison.

To begin with, vast lakes, which once swept westward from the bases of the
Rocky Mountains, were emptied into the Pacific. Next the draining currents
transformed into rivers, cut their way through the soil which formerly
covered the table-lands and commenced their attrition upon the underlying
continent of sandstone. It was a grinding which never ceased; every pebble
and every bowlder which lay in the way was pressed into the endless labor;
mountains were used up in channelling mountains.

The central magician was insatiable and pitiless; he demanded not only the
waters, but whatever they could bring; he hungered after the earth and all
that covered it. His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of
their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by
year into the canons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the
brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery.
Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its
forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What
had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert.

Then the minor Afreets perished of the results of their own obedience.
There being no soil, the fountains disappeared; there being no
evaporation, the rains diminished. Deprived of sustenance, nearly all the
shorter streams dried up, and the channels which they had hewn became arid
gullies. Only those rivers continued to exist which drew their waters from
the snowy slopes of the Rocky Mountains or from the spurs and ranges which
intersect the plateaux. The ages may come when these also will cease to
flow, and throughout all this portion of the continent the central
magician will call for his Afreets in vain.

For some time we must attend much to the scenery of the desert thus
created. It has become one of the individuals of our story, and interferes
with the fate of the merely human personages. Thurstane could not long
ignore its magnificent, oppressive, and potent presence. Forgetting
somewhat his anxieties about the loved one whom he had left behind, he
looked about him with some such amazement as if he had been translated
from earth into regions of supernature.

The canon through which he was flying was a groove cut in solid sandstone,
less than two hundred feet wide, with precipitous walls of fifteen hundred
feet, from the summit of which the rock sloped away into buttes and peaks
a thousand feet higher. On every side the horizon was half a mile above
his head. He was in a chasm, twenty-five hundred feet below the average
surface of the earth, the floor of which was a swift river.

He seemed to himself to be traversing the abodes of the Genii. Although he
had only heard of "Vathek," he thought of the Hall of Eblis. It was such
an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Dore in his picturings of
Dante's "Inferno." Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have
peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits. The shadow, the
aridity, the barrenness, the solemnity, the pitilessness, the horrid
cruelty of the scene, were more than might be received into the soul. It
was something which could not be imagined, and which when seen could not
be fully remembered. To gaze on it was like beholding the mysterious,
wicked countenance of the father of all evil. It was a landscape which was
a fiend.

The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor
finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the
ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them;
they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their
magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his
carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of
brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and
these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious: a
hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush.

The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous. There
were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in
length. There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter
of a mile in height. Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or
diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations. In consequence of the
varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a
series of innumerable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of
combats. There had been interminable strife here between the demons of
earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies. It
was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the
mausoleum of the forces of nature.

At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had
perished long ago, opened into the main canon. In passing these the
voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed
like the handiwork of that "anarch old," who wrought before the shaping of
the universe. One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than
eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone
one-third of a mile in depth. It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which
was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness. The stillness, the
absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like
closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language.

Another gorge was a ruin. The rock here being of various degrees of
density, the waters had essayed a thousand channels. All the softer veins
had been scooped out and washed away, leaving the harder blocks and masses
piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the
gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering
over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of
misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while
staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for
this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of
consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look
and pass on."

At one point two lateral canons opened side by side upon the San Juan. The
partition was a stupendous pile of rock fifteen hundred feet in altitude,
but so narrow that it seemed to the voyagers below like the single
standing wall of some ruined edifice. Although the space on its summit was
broad enough for a cathedral, it did not appear to them that it would
afford footing to a man, while the enclosing fissures looked narrow enough
to be crossed at a bound. On either side of this isolated bar of sandstone
a plumb-line might have been dropped straight to the level of the river.
The two chasms were tombs of shadow, where nothing ever stirred but winds.

The solitude of this continuous panorama of precipices was remarkable. It
was a region without man, or beast, or bird, or insect. The endless rocks,
not only denuded, but eroded and scraped by the action of bygone waters,
could furnish no support for animal life. A beast of prey, or even a
mountain goat, would have starved here. Could a condor of the Andes have
visited it, he would have spread his wings at once to leave it.

Yet horrible as the scene was, it was so sublime that it fascinated. For
hours, gazing at lofty masses, vast outlines, prodigious assemblages of
rocky imagery, endless strokes of natural frescoing, the three adventurers
either exchanged rare words of astonishment, or lay in reveries which
transported them beyond earth. What Thurstane felt he could only express
by recalling random lines of the "Paradise Lost." It seemed to him as if
they might at any moment emerge upon the lake of burning marl, and float
into the shadow of the walls of Pandemonium. He would not have felt
himself carried much beyond his present circumstances, had he suddenly
beheld Satan,

High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

He was roused from his dreams by the quick, dry, grasshopper-like voice of
Phineas Glover, asking, "What's that?"

A deep whisper came up the chasm. They could hardly distinguish it when
they stretched their hearing to the utmost. It seemed to steal with
difficulty against the rushing flood, and then to be swept down again. It
sighed threateningly for a moment, and instantaneously became silence. One
might liken it to a ghost trying to advance through some castle hall, only
to be borne backward by the fitful night-breeze, or by some mysterious
ban. Was the desert inhabited, and by disembodied demons?

After a further flight of half a mile, this variable sigh changed to a
continuous murmur. There was now before the voyagers a straight course of
nearly two miles, at the end of which lay hid the unseen power which gave
forth this solemn menace. The river, perfectly clear of rocks, was a sheet
of liquid porphyry, an arrow of dark-red water slightly flecked with foam.
The walls of the canon, scarcely fifty yards apart and more stupendous
than ever, rose in precipices without a landing-place or a foothold. So
far as eye could pierce into the twilight of the sublime chasm, there was
not a spot where the boat could be arrested in its flight, or where a
swimmer could find a shelf of safety.

"It is a rapid," said Thurstane. "You did well, Captain Glover, to get
another paddle."

"Lord bless ye!" returned the skipper impatiently, "it's lucky I was
whittlin' while you was thinkin'. If we on'y had a boat-hook!"

From moment to moment the murmur came nearer and grew louder. It was
smothered and then redoubled by the reverberations of the canon, so that
sometimes it seemed the tigerish snarl of a rapid, and sometimes the
leonine roar of a cataract. A bend of the chasm at last brought the
voyagers in sight of the monster, which was frothing and howling to devour
them. It was a terrific spectacle. It was like Apollyon "straddling quite
across the way," to intercept Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. From one dizzy rampart to the other, and as far down the echoing
cavern as eye could reach, the river was white with an arrowy rapid
storming though a labyrinth of rocks.

Sweeny, evidently praying, moved his lips in silence. Glover's face had
the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and
Thurstane's the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried to his
utmost by cannonade.




CHAPTER XXVI.


The three adventurers were entering the gorge of an impassable rapid.

Here had once been the barrier of a cataract; the waters had ground
through it, tumbled it down, and gnawed it to tatters; the scattered
bowlders which showed through the foam were the remnants of the Cyclopean
feast.

There appeared to be no escape from death. Any one of those stones would
rend the canvas boat from end to end, or double it into a wet rug; and if
a swimmer should perchance reach the bank, he would drown there, looking
up at precipices; or, if he should find a footing, it would only be to
starve.

"There is our chance," said Thurstane, pointing to a bowlder as large as a
house which stood under the northern wall of the canon, about a quarter of
a mile above the first yeast of the rapid.

He and Glover each took a paddle. They had but one object: it was to get
under the lee of the bowlder, and so stop their descent; after that they
would see what more could be done. Danger and safety were alike swift
here; it was a hurry as of battle or tempest Almost before they began to
hope for success, they were circling in the narrow eddy, very nearly a
whirlpool, which wheeled just below the isolated rock. Even here the
utmost caution was necessary, for while the Buchanan was as light as a
bubble, it was also as fragile.

Sounding the muddy water with their paddles, they slowly glided into the
angle between the bowlder and the precipice, and jammed the fragment of
the towline in a crevice. For the first time in six hours, and in a run of
thirty miles, they were at rest. Wiping the sweat of labor and anxiety
from their brows, they looked about them, at first in silence, querying
what next?

"I wish I was on an iceberg," said Glover in his despair.

"An' I wish I was in Oirland," added Sweeny. "But if the divil himself was
to want to desart here, he couldn't."

Thurstane believed that he had seen Clara for the last time, even should
she escape her own perils. Through his field-glass he surveyed the whole
gloomy scene with microscopic attention, searching for an exit out of this
monstrous man-trap, and searching in vain. It was as impossible to descend
the rapid as it was to scale the walls of the canon. He had just heard
Sweeny say, "I wish I was bein' murthered by thim naygurs," and had smiled
at the utterance of desperation with a grim sympathy, when a faint hope
dawned upon him.

Not more than a yard above the water was a ledge or shelf in the face of
the precipice. The layer of sandstone immediately over this shelf was
evidently softer than the general mass; and in other days (centuries ago),
when it had formed one level with the bed of the river, it had been deeply
eroded. This erosion had been carried along the canon on an even line of
altitude as far as the softer layer extended. Thurstane could trace it
with his glass for what seemed to him a mile, and there was of course a
possibility that it reached below the foot of the rapid. The groove was
everywhere about twenty feet high, while its breadth varied from a yard or
so to nearly a rod.

Here, then, was a road by which they might perhaps turn the obstacle. The
only difficulty was that while the bed of the river descended rapidly, the
shelf kept on at the same elevation, so that eventually the travellers
would come to a jumping-off place. How high would it be? Could they get
down it so as to regain the stream and resume their navigation? Well, they
must try it; there was no other road. With one eloquent wave of his hand
Thurstane pointed out this slender chance of escape to his comrades.

"Hurray!" shouted Glover, after a long stare, in which the emotions
succeeded each other like colors in a dolphin.

"Can we make the jump at the other end?" asked the lieutenant.

"Reckon so," chirruped Glover. "Look a here."

He exhibited a pile of unpleasant-looking matter which proved to be a mass
of strips of fresh hide.

"Hoss skin," he explained. "Peeled off a mustang. Borrowed it from that
Texan cuss. Thought likely we might want to splice our towline. 'Bout ten
fathom, I reckon; 'n' there's the lariat, two fathom more. All we've got
to de is to pack up, stick our backs under, 'n' travel."

It was three o'clock in the afternoon when they commenced their
preparations for making this extraordinary portage. Sunk as they were
twenty-five hundred feet in the bowels of the earth, the sun had already
set for them; but they were still favored with a sort of twilight
radiance, and they could count upon it for a couple of hours longer.
Carefully the guns, paddles, and stores were landed on the marvellous
causeway; and then, with still greater caution, the boat was lifted to the
same support and taken to pieces. The whole mass of material, some two
hundred pounds in weight, was divided into three portions. Each shouldered
his pack, and the strange journey commenced.

"Sweeny, don't you fall off," said Glover. "We can't spare them sticks."

"If I fall off, ye may shute me where I stand," returned Sweeny. "I know
better'n to get drowned and starved to death in wan. I can take care av
meself. I've sailed this a way many a time in th' ould counthry."

The road was a smooth and easy one, barring a few cumbering bowlders. To
the left and below was the river, roaring, hissing, and foaming through
its _chevaux-de-frise_ of rocks. In front the canon stretched on and on
until its walls grew dim with shadow and distance. Above were overhanging
precipices and a blue streak of sunlit sky.

It was quite dusk with the wanderers before they reached a point where the
San Juan once more flowed with an undisturbed current.

"We can't launch by this light," said Thurstane. "We will sleep here."

"It'll be a longish night," commented Glover. "But don't see's we can
shorten it by growlin'. When fellahs travel in the bowels 'f th' earth,
they've got to follow the customs 'f th' country. Puts me in mind of Jonah
in the whale's belly. Putty short tacks, Capm. Nine hours a day won't git
us along; any too fast. But can't help it. Night travellin' ain't suited
to our boat. Suthin' like a bladder football: one pin-prick 'd cowallapse
it. Wal, so we'll settle. Lucky we wanted our blankets to set on. 'Pears
to me this rock's a leetle harder'n a common deck plank. Unroll the boat,
Capm? Wal, guess we'd better. Needs dryin'a speck. Too much soakin' an't
good for canvas. Better dry it out, 'n' fold it up, 'n' sleep on't. This
passageway that we're in, sh'd say at might git up a smart draught. What
d'ye say to this spot for campin'? Twenty foot breadth of beam here. Kind
of a stateroom, or bridal chamber. No need of fallin' out. Ever walk in
yer sleep, Sweeny? Better cut it right square off to-night. Five fathom
down to the river, sh'd say. Splash ye awfully, Sweeny."

Thus did Captain Glover prattle in his cheerful way while the party made
its preparations for the night.

They were like ants lodged in some transverse crack of a lofty wall. They
were in a deep cut of the shelf, with fifteen hundred or two thousand feet
of sandstone above, and the porphyry-colored river thirty feet below. The
narrow strip of sky far above their heads was darkening rapidly with the
approach of night, and with an accumulation of clouds. All of a sudden
there was a descent of muddy water, charged with particles of red earth
and powdered sandstone, pouring by them down the overhanging precipice.

"Liftinant!" exclaimed Sweeny, "thim naygurs up there is washin' their
dirty hides an' pourin' the suds down on us."

"It's the rain, Sweeny. There's a shower on the plateau above."

"The rain, is it? Thin all nate people in that counthry must stand in
great nade of ombrellys."

The scene was more marvellous than ever. Not a drop of rain fell in the
river; the immense facade opposite them was as dry as a skull; yet here
was this muddy cataract. It fell for half an hour, scarcely so much as
spattering them in their recess, but plunging over them into the torrent
beneath. By the time it ceased they had eaten their supper of hard bread
and harder beef, and lighted their pipes to allay their thirst. There was
a laying of plans to regain the river to-morrow, a grave calculation as to
how long their provisions would last, and in general much talk about their
chances.

"Not a shine of a lookout for gittin' back to the Casa?" queried Captain
Glover. "Knowed it," he added, when the lieutenant sadly shook his head.
"Fool for talkin' 'bout it. How 'bout reachin' the trail to the Moqui
country?"

"I have been thinking of it all day," said Thurstane. "We must give it up.
Every one of the branch canons on the other bank trends wrong. We couldn't
cross them; we should have to follow them; it's an impassable hell of a
country. We might by bare chance reach the Moqui pueblos; but the
probability is that we should die in the desert of thirst. We shall have
to run the river. Perhaps we shall have to run the Colorado too. If so, we
had better keep on to Diamond creek, and from there push by land to Cactus
Pass. Cactus Pass is on the trail, and we may meet emigrants there. I
don't know what better to suggest."

"Dessay it's a tiptop idee," assented Glover cheeringly. "Anyhow, if we
take on down the river, it seems like follyin' the guidings of
Providence."

In spite of their strange situation and doubtful prospects, the three
adventurers slept early and soundly. When they awoke it was daybreak, and
after chewing the hardest, dryest, and rawest of breakfasts, they began
their preparations to reach the river. To effect this, it was necessary to
find a cleft in the ledge where they could fasten a cord securely, and
below it a footing at the water's edge where they could put their boat
together and launch it. It would not do to go far down the canon, for the
bed of the stream descended while the shelf retained its level, and the
distance between them was already sufficiently alarming. After an anxious
search they discovered a bowlder lying in the river beneath the shelf,
with a flat surface perfectly suited to their purpose. There, too, was a
cleft, but a miserably small one.

"We can't jam a cord in that," said Glover; "nor the handle of a paddle
nuther."

"It'll howld me bagonet," suggested Sweeny.

"It can be made to hold it," decided Thurstane. "We must drill away till
it does hold it."

An hour's labor enabled them to insert the bayonet to the handle and wedge
it with spikes split off from the precious wood of the paddles. When it
seemed firm enough to support a strong lateral pressure, Glover knotted on
to it, in his deft sailor fashion, a strip of the horse hide, and added
others to that until he had a cord of some forty feet. After testing every
inch and every knot, he said: "Who starts first?"

"I will try it," answered Thurstane.

"Lightest first, I reckon," observed Glover.

Sweeny looked at the precipice, skipped about the shelf uneasily, made a
struggle with his fears, and asked, "Will ye let me down aisy?"

"Jest 's easy 's rollin' off a log."

"That's aisy enough. It's the lightin' that's har-rd. If it comes to
rowlin' down, I'll let ye have the first rowl. I've no moind to git ahead
of me betthers."

"Try it, my lad," said Thurstane. "The real danger comes with the last
man. He will have to trust to the bayonet alone."

"An' what'll I do whirl I get down there?"

"Take the traps off the cord as we send them down, and pile them on the
rock."

"I'm off," said Sweeny, after one more look into the chasm. While the
others held the cord to keep the strain from coming on the bayonet, he
gripped it with both hands, edged stern foremost over the precipice, and
slipped rapidly to the bowlder, whence he sent up a hoot of exultation.
The cord was drawn back; the boat was made up in two bundles, which were
lowered in succession; then the provisions, paddles, arms, etc. Now came
the question whether Thurstane or Glover should remain last on the ledge.

"Lightest last," said the lean skipper. "Stands to reason."

"It's my duty to take the hot end of the poker," replied the officer.
"Loser goes first," said Glover, producing a copper. "Heads or tails?"

"Heads," guessed Thurstane.

"It's a tail. Catch hold, Capm. Slow 'n' easy till you get over."

The cord holding firm, Thurstane reached the bowlder, and was presently
joined by Glover.

"Liftinant, I want me bagonet," cried Sweeny. "Will I go up afther it?"

"How the dickens 'd you git down again?" asked Glover. "Guess you'll have
to leave your bayonet where it sticks. But, Capm, we want that line. Can't
you shute it away, clost by th' edge?"

The third shot was a lucky one, and brought down the precious cord. Then
came the work of putting the boat into shape, launching it, getting in the
stores, and lastly the voyagers.

"Tight's a drum yit," observed Glover, surveying the coracle admiringly.
"Fust time I ever sailed _on_ canvas. Great notion. Don't draw more'n
three inches. Might sail acrost country with it. Capm, it's the only boat
ever invented that could git down this blasted river."

Glover and Sweeny, two of the most talkative creatures on earth, chattered
much to each other. Thurstane sometimes listened to them, sometimes lost
himself in reveries about Clara, sometimes surveyed the scenery of the
canon.

The abyss was always the same, yet with colossal variety: here and there
yawnings of veined precipices, followed by cavernous closings of the awful
sides; breakings in of subsidiary canons, some narrow clefts, and others
gaping shattered mouths; the walls now presenting long lines of rampart,
and now a succession of peaks. But still, although they had now traversed
the chasm for seventy or eighty miles, they found no close and no
declension to its solemn grandeur.

At last came another menace, a murmur deeper and hoarser than that of the
rapid, steadily swelling as they advanced until it was a continuous
thunder. This time there could be no doubt that they were entering upon a
scene of yet undecided battle between the eternal assault of the river and
the immemorial resistance of the mountains.

The quickening speed of the waters, and the ceaseless bellow of their
charging trumpets as they tore into some yet unseen abyss, announced one
of those struggles of nature in which man must be a spectator or a victim.




CHAPTER XXVII.


As Thurstane approached the cataract of the San Juan he thought of the
rapids above Niagara, and of the men who had been whirled down them,
foreseeing their fate and struggling against it, but unable to escape it.

"We must keep near one wall or the other," he said. "The middle of the
river is sure death."

Paddling toward the northern bank, simply because it had saved them in
their former peril, they floated like a leaf in the shadows of the
precipices, watching for some footway by which to turn the lair of the
monster ahead.

The scenery here did not consist exclusively of two lofty ramparts
fronting each other. Before the river had established its present channel
it had tried the strength of the plateau in various directions, slashing
the upper strata into a succession of canons, which were now lofty and
arid gullies, divided from each other by every conceivable form of rocky
ruin. Rotundas, amphitheatres, castellated walls, cathedrals of
unparalleled immensity, facades of palaces huge enough to be the abodes of
the principalities and powers of the air, far-stretching semblances of
cities tottering to destruction, all fashions of domes, towers, minarets,
spires, and obelisks, with a population of misshapen demons and monsters,
looked down from sublime heights upon the voyagers. At every turn in the
river the panorama changed, and they beheld new marvels of this Titanic
architecture. There was no end to the gigantic and grotesque variety of
the commingling outlines. The vastness, the loneliness, the stillness, the
twilight sombreness, were awful. And through all reverberated incessantly
the defiant clarion of the cataract.

The day was drawing to that early death which it has always had and must
always have in these abysses. Knowing how suddenly darkness would fall,
and not daring to attempt the unknown without light, the travellers looked
for a mooring spot. There was a grim abutment at least eighteen hundred
feet high; at its base two rocks, which had tumbled ages ago from the
summit, formed a rude breakwater; and on this barrier had collected a bed
of coarse pebbles, strewn with driftwood. Here they stopped their flight,
unloaded the boat and beached it. The drift-wood furnished them a softer
bed than usual, and materials for a fire.

Night supervened with the suddenness of a death which has been looked for,
but which is at last a surprise. Shadow after shadow crept down the walls
of the chasm, blurred its projections, darkened its faces, and crowded its
recesses. The line of sky, seen through the jagged and sinuous opening
above, changed slowly to gloom and then to blackness. There was no light
in this rocky intestine of the earth except the red flicker of the
camp-fire. It fought feebly with the powers of darkness; it sent tremulous
despairing flashes athwart the swift ebony river; it reached out with
momentary gleams to the nearer facades of precipice; it reeled, drooped,
and shuddered as if in hopeless horror. Probably, since the world began,
no other fire lighted by man had struggled against the gloom of this
tremendous amphitheatre. The darknesses were astonished at it, but they