were also uncomprehending and hostile. They refused to be dissipated, and
they were victorious.

After two hours a change came upon the scene. The moon rose, filled the
upper air with its radiance, and bathed in silver the slopes of the
mountains. The narrow belt of visible sky resembled a milky way. The light
continued to descend and work miracles. Isolated turrets, domes, and
pinnacles came out in gleaming relief against the dark-blue background of
the heavens. The opposite crest of the canon shone with a broad
illumination. All the uncouth demons and monsters of the rocks awoke,
glaring and blinking, to menace the voyagers in the depths below. The
contrast between this supereminent brilliancy and the sullen obscurity of
the subterranean river made the latter seem more than ever like Styx or
Acheron.

The travellers were awakened in the morning by the trumpetings of the
cataract. They embarked and dropped down the stream, hugging the northern
rampart and watching anxiously. Presently there was a clear sweep of a
mile; the clamor now came straight up to them with redoubled vehemence; a
ghost of spray arose and waved threateningly, as if forbidding further
passage. It was the roar and smoke of an artillery which had thundered for
ages, and would thunder for ages to come. It was a voice and signal which
summoned reinforcements of waters, and in obedience to which the waters
charged eternally.

The boat had shudders. Every spasm jerked it onward a little faster. It
flew with a tremulous speed which was terrible. Thurstane, a good soldier,
able to obey as well as to direct, knowing that if Glover could not steer
wisely no one could, sat, paddle in hand, awaiting orders. Sweeny
fidgeted, looked from one to another, looked at the mist ahead, cringed,
wanted to speak, and said nothing. Glover, working hard with his paddle,
and just barely keeping the coracle bows on, peered and grinned as if he
were facing a hurricane. There was no time to have a care for sunken
bowlders, reaching up to rend the thin bottom. The one giant danger of the
cataract was enough to fill the mind and bar out every minor terror. Its
deafening threats demanded the whole of the imagination. Compared with the
probability of plunging down an unknown depth into a boiling hell of
waters, all other peril seemed too trifling to attract notice. Such a fate
is an enhancement of the horrors of death.

"Liftinant, let's go over with a whoop," called Sweeny. "It's much
aisier."

"Keep quiet, my lad," replied the officer. "We must hear orders."

"All right, Liftinant," said Sweeny, relieved by having spoken.

At this moment Glover shouted cheerfully, "We ain't dead yit There's a
ledge."

"I see it," nodded Thurstane.

"Where there's a ledge there's an eddy," screamed Glover, raising his
voice to pierce the hiss of the rapid and the roar of the cascade.

Below them, jutting out from the precipitous northern bank, was a low bar
of rock over which the river did not sweep. It was the remnant of a once
lofty barrier; the waters had, as it were, gnawed it to the bone, but they
had not destroyed it. In two minutes the voyagers were beside it, paddling
with all their strength against the eddy which whirled along its edge
toward the cataract, and tossing over the short, spiteful ripples raised
by the sudden turn of the current. With a "Hooroo!" Sweeny tumbled ashore,
lariat in hand, and struck his army shoes into the crevices of the
shattered sandstone. In five minutes more the boat was unloaded and lifted
upon the ledge.

The travellers did not go to look at the cataract; their immediate and
urgent need was to get by it. Making up their bundles as usual, they
commenced a struggle with the intricacies and obstacles of the portage.
The eroded, disintegrated plateau descended to the river in a huge
confusion of ruin, and they had to pick their way for miles through a
labyrinth of cliffs, needles, towers, and bowlders. Reaching the river
once more, they found themselves upon a little plain of moderately fertile
earth, the first plain and the first earth which they had seen since
entering the canon. The cataract was invisible; a rock cathedral several
hundred feet high hid it; they could scarcely discern its lofty ghost of
spray.

Two miles away, in the middle of the plain, appeared a ruin of adobe
walls, guttered and fissured by the weather. It was undoubtedly a monument
of that partially civilized race, Aztec, Toltec, or Moqui, which centuries
ago dotted the American desert with cities, and passed away without
leaving other record. With his field-glass Thurstane discovered what he
judged to be another similar structure crowning a distant butte. They had
no time to visit these remains, and they resumed their voyage.

After skirting the plain for several miles, they reentered the canon,
drifted two hours or more between its solemn walls, and then came out upon
a wide sweep of open country. The great canon of the San Juan had been
traversed nearly from end to end in safety. When the adventurers realized
their triumph they rose to their feet and gave nine hurrahs.

"It's loike a rich man comin' through the oye av a needle," observed
Sweeny.

"Only this haint much the air 'f the New Jerusalem," returned Glover,
glancing at the arid waste of buttes and ranges in the distance.

"We oughter look up some huntin'," he continued. "Locker'll begin to show
bottom b'fore long. Sweeny, wouldn't you like to kill suthin?"

"I'd like to kill a pig," said Sweeny.

"Wal, guess we'll probably come acrost one. They's a kind of pigs in these
deestricks putty nigh's long 's this boat."

"There ain't," returned Sweeny.

"Call 'em grizzlies when they call 'em at all," pursued the sly Glover.

"They may call 'em what they plaze if they won't call 'em as long as this
boat."

Fortune so managed things, by way of carrying out Glover's joke, that a
huge grizzly just then snowed himself on the bank, some two hundred yards
below the boat.

After easily slaughtering one bear, the travellers had a far more
interesting season with another, who was allured to the scene by the smell
of jerking meat, and who gave them a very lively half hour of it, it being
hard to say which was the most hunted, the bruin or the humans.

"Look a' that now!" groaned Sweeny, when the victory had been secured.
"The baste has chawed up me gun barrl loike it was a plug o' tobacky."

"Throw it away," ordered Thurstane, after inspecting the twisted and
lacerated musket.

Tenderly and tearfully Sweeny laid aside the first gun that he had ever
carried, went again and again to look at its mangled form as if it were a
dead relative, and in the end raised a little mausoleum of cobble-stones
over it.

"If there was any whiskey, I'd give um a wake," he sighed. "I'm a pratty
soldier now, without a gun to me back."

"I'll let ye carry mine when we come to foot it," suggested Glover.

"Yis, an' ye may carry me part av the boat," retorted Sweeny.

The bear meat was tough and musky, but it could be eaten, must be eaten,
ind was eaten. During the time required for jerking a quantity of it,
Glover made a boat out of the two hides, scraping them with a hunting
knife, sewing them with a sailor's needle and strands of the
sounding-line, and stretching them on a frame of green saplings, the
result being a craft six feet long by nearly four broad, and about the
shape of a half walnut-shell. The long hair was left on, as a protection
against the rocks of the river, and the seams were filled and plastered
with bear's grease.

"It's a mighty bad-smellin' thing," remarked Sweeny. "An who's goin' to
back it over the portages?"

"Robinson Crusoe!" exclaimed Glover. "I never thought of that. Wal, let's
see. Oh, we kin tow her astarn in plain sailin', 'n' when we come to a
cataract we can put Sweeny in an' let her slide."

"No ye can't," said Sweeny. "It's big enough, an' yet it won't howld um,
no more'n a tayspoon'll howld a flay."

"Wal, we kin let her slide without a crew, 'n' pick her up arterwards,"
decided Glover.

We must hasten over the minor events of this remarkable journey. The
travellers, towing the bearskin boat behind the Buchanan, passed the mouth
of Canon Bonito, and soon afterward beheld the San Juan swallowed up in
the Grand River, a far larger stream which rises in the Rocky Mountains
east of Utah. They swept by the horrible country of the Utes and Payoches,
without holding intercourse with its squalid and savage inhabitants. Here
and there, at the foot of some monstrous precipice, in a profound recess
surrounded by a frenzy of rocks, they saw hamlets of a few miserable
wigwams, with patches of starveling corn and beans. Sharp wild cries, like
the calls of malicious brownies, or the shrieks of condemned spirits, were
sent after them, without obtaining response.

"They bees only naygurs," observed Sweeny. "Niver moind their blaggard
ways."

After the confluence with the Grand River came solitude. The land had been
swept and garnished: swept by the waters and garnished with horrors; a
land of canons, plateaux, and ranges, all arid; a land of desolation and
the shadow of death. There was nothing on which man or beast could support
life; nature's power of renovation was for the time suspended, and seemed
extinct. It was a desert which nothing could restore to fruitfulness
except the slow mysterious forces of a geologic revolution.

Beyond the Sierra de Lanterna the Grand River was joined by the Green
River, streaming down through gullied plateaux from the deserts of Utah
and the mountains which tower between Oregon and Nebraska. Henceforward,
still locked in Titanic defiles or flanked by Cyclopean _debris_, they
were on the Colorado of the West.

Thurstane meditated as to what course he should follow. Should he strike
southward by land for the Bernalillo trail, risking a march through a
wide, rocky, lifeless, and perhaps waterless wilderness? Or should he
attempt to descend a river even more terrible to navigate than the San
Juan? It seemed to him that the hardships and dangers of either plan were
about the same.

But the Colorado route would be the swiftest; the Colorado would take him
quickest to Clara. For he trusted that she had long before this got back
to the Moqui country and resumed her journey across the continent. He
could not really fear that any deadly harm would befall her. He had the
firmness of a soldier and the faith of a lover.

At last, silently and solemnly, through a portal thousands of feet in
height, the voyagers glided into the perilous mystery of the Great Canon
of the Colorado, the most sublime and terrible waterway of this planet.




CHAPTER XXVIII.


Thurstane had strange emotions as he swept into the "caverns measureless
to man" of the Great Canon of the Colorado.

It seemed like a push of destiny rather than a step of volition. An angel
or a demon impelled him into the unknown; a supernatural portal had opened
to give him passage; then it had closed behind him forever.

The canon, with all its two hundred and forty miles of marvels and perils,
presented itself to his imagination as a unity. The first step within it
placed him under an enchantment from which there was no escape until the
whole circuit of the spell should be completed. He was like Orlando in the
magic garden, when the gate vanished immediately upon his entrance,
leaving him no choice but to press on from trial to trial. He was no more
free to pause or turn back than Grecian ghosts sailing down Acheron toward
the throne of Radamanthus.

Direct statement, and even the higher speech of simile, fail to describe
the Great Canon and the emotion which it produces. Were its fronting
precipices organs, with their mountainous columns and pilasters for
organ-pipes, they might produce a _de profundis_ worthy of the scene and
of its sentiments, its inspiration. This is not bombast; so far from
exaggerating it does not even attain to the subject; no words can so much
as outline the effects of eighty leagues of mountain sculptured by a great
river.

Let us venture one comparison. Imagine a groove a foot broad and twenty
feet deep, with a runnel of water trickling at the bottom of it and a
fleck of dust floating down the rivulet. Now increase the dimensions until
the groove is two hundred and fifty feet in breadth by five thousand feet
in depth, and the speck a boat with three voyagers. You have the Great
Canon of the Colorado and Thurstane and his comrades seeking its issue.

"Do you call this a counthry?" asked Sweeny, after an awe-stricken
silence. "I'm thinkin' we're gittin' outside av the worrld like."

"An' I'm thinkin' we're gittin' too fur inside on't," muttered Glover.
"Look's 's though we might slip clean under afore long. Most low-spirited
hole I ever rolled into. 'Minds me 'f that last ditch people talk of dyin'
in. Must say I'd rather be in the trough 'f the sea."

"An' what kind av a trough is that?" inquired Sweeny, inquisitive even in
his dumps.

"It's the trough where they feed the niggers out to the sharks."

"Faix, an' I'd loike to see it at feedin' time," answered Sweeny with a
feeble chuckle.

Nature as it is is one image; nature as it appears is a thousand; or
rather it is infinite. Every soul is a mirror, reflecting what faces it;
but the reflections differ as do the souls that give them. To the three
men who now gazed on the Great Canon it was far from being the same
object.

Sweeny surveyed it as an old Greek or Roman might, with simple distaste
and horror. Glover, ignorant and limited as he was, received far more of
its inspiration. Even while "chirking up" his companions with trivial talk
and jests he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan's Dark Valley and
Milton's Hell, the two sublimest landscapes that had ever been presented
to his imagination. Thurstane, gifted with much of the sympathy of the
great Teutonic race for nature, was far more profoundly affected. The
overshadowing altitudes and majesties of the chasm moved him as might
oratorios or other solemn music. Frequently he forgot hardships, dangers,
isolation, the hard luck of the past, the ugly prospects of the future in
reveries which were a succession of such emotions as wonder, worship, and
love.

No doubt the scenery had the more power over him because, by gazing at it
day after day while his heart was full of Clara, he got into a way of
animating it with her. Far away as she was, and divided from him perhaps
forever, she haunted the canon, transformed it and gave it grace. He could
see her face everywhere; he could see it even without shutting his eyes;
it made the arrogant and malignant cliffs seraphic. By the way, the
vividness of his memory with regard to that fair, sweet, girlish
countenance was wonderful, only that such a memory, the memory of the
heart, is common. There was not one of her expressions which was not his
property. Each and all, he could call them-up at will, making them pass
before him in heavenly procession, surrounding himself with angels. It was
the power of the ring which is given to the slaves of love.

He had some vagaries (the vagaries of those who are subjugated by a strong
and permanent emotion) which approached insanity. For instance, he
selected a gigantic column of sandstone as bearing some resemblance to
Clara, and so identified it with her that presently he could see her face
crowning it, though concealed by the similitude of a rocky veil. This
image took such possession of him that he watched it with fascination, and
when a monstrous cliff slid between it and him he felt as if here were a
new parting; as if he were once more bidding her a speechless, hopeless
farewell.

During the greater part of this voyage he was a very uninteresting
companion. He sat quiet and silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips;
he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a
month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered
him an eccentric.

"Naterally not quite himself," judged the skipper. "Some folks is born
knocked on the head."

"May be officers is always that a way," was one of Sweeny's suggestions.
"It must be mighty dull bein' an officer."

We must not forget the Great Canon. The voyagers were amid magnitudes and
sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and
principalities of supernature. They were borne through an architecture of
aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled
by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and
stonehenges.

For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a
jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head
towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides
curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a
pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied
Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep
wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in
their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They
ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which
helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in
the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable
features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of
the canon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its
transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they
were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible.
Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left
open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again,
where it was entered by minor canons, it became a breach through crowded
pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries.
Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred
with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and
elevations, which would have been monstrous in other landscapes, were here
but minor decorations.

Something like half of the strata with which earth is sheathed has been
cut through by the Colorado, beginning at the top of the groove with
hundreds of feet of limestone, and closing at the bottom with a thousand
feet of granite. Here, too, as in many other wonder-spots of the American
desert, nature's sculpture is rivalled by her painting. Bluish-gray
limestone, containing corals; mottled limestone, charged with slates,
flint, and chalcedony; red, brown, and blue limestone, mixed with red,
green, and yellow shales; sandstone of all tints, white, brown, ochry,
dark red, speckled and foliated; coarse silicious sandstone, and red
quartzose sandstone beautifully veined with purple; layers of
conglomerate, of many colored shales, argillaceous iron, and black oxide
manganese; massive black and white granite, traversed by streaks of quartz
and of red sienite; coarse red felspathic granite, mixed with large plates
of silver mica; such is the masonry and such the frescoing.

Through this marvellous museum our three spectators wandered in hourly
peril of death. The Afreets of the waters and the Afreets of the rocks,
guarding the gateway which they had jointly builded, waged incessant
warfare with the intruders. Although the current ran five miles an hour,
it was a lucky day when the boat made forty miles. Every evening the
travellers must find a beach or shelf where they could haul up for the
night. Darkness covered destruction, and light exposed dangers. The
bubble-like nature of the boat afforded at once a possibility of easy
advance and of instantaneous foundering. Every hour that it floated was a
miracle, and so they grimly and patiently understood it.

A few days in the canon changed the countenances of these men. They looked
like veterans of many battles. There was no bravado in their faces. The
expression which lived there was a resigned, suffering, stubborn courage.
It was the "silent berserker rage" which Carlyle praises. It was the
speechless endurance which you see in portraits of the Great Frederick,
Wellington, and Grant.

They relieved each other. The bow was guard duty; the steering was light
duty; the midships off duty. It must be understood that, the great danger
being sunken rocks, one man always crouched in the bow, with a paddle
plunged below the surface, feeling for ambushes of the stony bushwhackers.
Occasionally all three had to labor, jumping into shallows, lifting the
boat over beds of pebbles, perhaps lightening it of arms and provisions,
perhaps carrying all ashore to seek a portage.

"It's the best canew 'n' the wust canew I ever see for sech a voyage,"
observed Glover. "Navigatin' in it puts me in mind 'f angels settin' on a
cloud. The cloud can go anywhere; but what if ye should slump through?"

"Och! ye're a heretic, 'n' don't belave angels can fly," put in Sweeny.

"Can't ye talk without takin' out yer paddle?" called Glover. "Mind yer
soundings."

Glover was at the helm just then, while Sweeny was at the bow. Thurstane,
sitting cross-legged on the light wooden flooring of the boat, was
entering topographical observations in his journal. Hearing the skipper's
warning, he looked up sharply; but both the call and the glance came too
late to prevent a catastrophe. Just in that instant the boat caught
against some obstacle, turned slowly around before the push of the
current, swung loose with a jerk and floated on, the water bubbling
through the flooring. A hole had been torn in the canvas, and the
cockle-shell was foundering.

"Sound!" shouted Thurstane to Sweeny; then, turning to Glover, "Haul up
the Grizzly!"

The tub-boat of bearskin was dragged alongside, and Thurstane instantly
threw the provisions and arms into it.

"Three foot," squealed Sweeny.

"Jump overboard," ordered the lieutenant.

By the time they were on their feet in the water the Buchanan was half
full, and the swift current was pulling at it like a giant, while the
Grizzly, floating deep, was almost equally unmanageable. The situation had
in one minute changed from tranquil voyaging to deadly peril. Sweeny,
unable to swim, and staggering in the rapid, made a plunge at the bearskin
boat, probably with an idea of getting into it. But Thurstane, all himself
from the first, shouted in that brazen voice of military command which is
so secure of obedience, "Steady, man! Don't climb in. Cut the lariat close
up to the Buchanan, and then hold on to the Grizzly."

Restored to his self-possession, Sweeny laboriously wound the straining
lariat around his left arm and sawed it in two with his jagged
pocket-knife. Then came a doubtful fight between him and the Colorado for
the possession of the heavy and clumsy tub.

Meantime Thurstane and Glover, the former at the bow and the latter at the
stern of the Buchanan, were engaged in a similar tussle, just barely
holding on and no more.

"We can't stand this," said the officer. "We must empty her."

"Jest so," panted Glover. "You're up stream. Can you raise your eend? We
mustn't capsize her; we might lose the flooring."

Thurstane stooped slowly and cautiously until he had got his shoulder
under the bow.

"Easy!" called Glover. "Awful easy! Don't break her back. Don't upset
_me_."

Gently, deliberately, with the utmost care, Thurstane straightened himself
until he had lifted the bow of the boat clear of the current.

"Now I'll hoist," said the skipper. "You turn her slowly--jest the least
mite. Don't capsize her."

It was a Herculean struggle. There was still a ponderous weight of water
in the boat. The slight frame sagged and the flexible siding bulged.
Glover with difficulty kept his feet, and he could only lift the stern
very slightly.

"You can't do it," decided Thurstane. "Don't wear yourself out trying it.
Hold steady where you are, while I let down."

When the boat was restored to its level it floated higher than before, for
some of the water had drained out.

"Now lift slowly," directed Thurstane. "Slow and sure. She'll clear little
by little."

A quiet, steady lift, lasting perhaps two or three minutes, brought the
floor of the boat to the surface of the current.

"It's wearing," said the lieutenant, cheering his worried fellow-laborer
with a smile. "Stand steady for a minute and try to rest. You, Sweeny,
move in toward the bank. Hold on to your boat like the devil. If the water
deepens, sing out."

Sweeny, gripping his lariat desperately, commenced a staggering march over
the cobble-stone bottom, his anxious nose pointed toward a beach of
bowlders beneath the southern precipice.

"Now then," said Thurstane to Glover, "we must get her on our heads and
follow Sweeny. Are you ready? Up with her!"

A long, reeling hoist set the Buchanan on the heads of the two men, one
standing under the bow and one under the stern, their arms extended and
their hands clutching the sides. The beach was forty yards away; the
current was swift and as opaque as chocolate; they could not see what
depths might gape before them; but they must do the distance without
falling, or perish.

"Left foot first," shouted the officer. "Forward--march!"




CHAPTER XXIX.


When the adventurers commenced their tottering march toward the shore of
the Colorado, Sweeny, dragging the clumsy bearskin boat, was a few yards
in advance of Thurstane and Glover, bearing the canvas boat.

Every one of the three had as much as he could handle. The Grizzly, pulled
at by the furious current, bobbed up and down and hither and thither,
nearly capsizing Sweeny at every other step. The Buchanan, weighing one
hundred and fifty pounds when dry, and now somewhat heavier because of its
thorough wetting, made a heavy load for two men who were hip deep in swift
water.

"Slow and sure," repeated Thurstane. "It's a five minutes job. Keep your
courage and your feet for five minutes. Then we'll live a hundred years."

"Liftinant, is this soldierin'?" squealed Sweeny.

"Yes, my man, this is soldiering."

"Thin I'll do me dooty if I pull me arrms off."

But there was not much talking. Pretty nearly all their breath was needed
for the fight with the river. Glover, a slender and narrow-shouldered
creature, was particularly distressed; and his only remark during the
pilgrimage shoreward was, "I'd like to change hosses."

Sweeny, leading the way, got up to his waist once and yelled, "I'll
drown."

Then he backed a little, took a new direction, found shallower water, and
tottled onward to victory. The moment he reached the shore he gave a
shrill hoot of exultation, went at his bearskin craft with both hands,
dragged it clean out of the water, and gave it a couple of furious kicks.

"Take that!" he yelped. "Ye're wickeder nor both yer fathers. But I've
bate ye. Oh, ye blathering jerkin', bogglin' baste, ye!"

Then he splashed into the river, joined his hard-pressed comrades, got his
head under the centre of the Buchanan, and lifted sturdily. In another
minute the precious burden was safe on a large flat rock, and the three
men were stretched out panting beside it. Glover was used up; he was
trembling from head to foot with fatigue; he had reached shore just in
time to fall on it instead of into the river.

"Ye'd make a purty soldier," scoffed Sweeny, a habitual chaffer, like most
Irishmen.

"It was the histin' that busted me," gasped the skipper. "I can't handle a
ton o' water."

"Godamighty made ye already busted, I'm a thinkin'," retorted Sweeny.

As soon as Glover could rise he examined the Buchanan. There was a ragged
rent in the bottom four inches long, and the canvas in other places had
been badly rubbed. The voyagers looked at the hole, looked at the horrible
chasm which locked them in, and thought with a sudden despair of the great
environment of desert.

The situation could hardly be more gloomy. Having voyaged for five days in
the Great Canon, they were entangled in the very centre of the folds of
that monstrous anaconda. Their footing was a lap of level not more than
thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and
bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation. Above them rose a
precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was
undoubtedly a mile in height. Had there been armies or cities over their
heads, they could not have discovered it by either eye or ear.

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 canon. 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 canon 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 canon, as if a thousand Paddies were holding revel
there.

"Oh! yees may laugh," retorted Sweeny, "but yees can't laugh us out av
it."

"I'll sheath the whole bottom with bearskin," said Glover. "Then we can
let her grind. It'll be an all day's chore, Capm--perhaps two days."

They passed thirty-six hours in this miserable bivouac. Glover worked
during every moment of daylight. No one else could do anything. A green
hand might break a needle, and a needle broken was a step toward death.
From dawn to dusk he planned, cut, punctured, and sewed with the patience
of an old sailor, until he had covered the rent with a patch of bearskin
which fitted as if it had grown there. Finally the whole bottom was
doubled with hide, the long, coarse fur still on it, and the grain running
from stem to stern so as to aid in sliding over the sand and pebbles of
the shallows.

While Glover worked the others slept, lounged, cooked, waited. There was
no food, by the way, but the hard, leathery, tasteless jerked meat of the
grizzly bears, which had begun to pall upon them so they could hardly
swallow it. Eating was merely a duty, and a disagreeable one.

When Glover announced that the boat was ready for launching, Sweeny
uttered a yelp of joy, like a dog who sees a prospect of hunting.

"Ah, you paddywhack!" growled the skipper. "All this work for you. Punch
another hole, 'n' I'll take yer own hide to patch it."

"I'll give ye lave," returned Sweeny. "Wan bare skin 's good as another.
Only I might want me own back agin for dress-parade."

Once more on the Colorado. Although the boat floated deeper than before,
navigation in it was undoubtedly safer, so that they made bolder ventures
and swifter progress. Such portages, however, as they were still obliged
to traverse, were very severe, inasmuch as the Buchanan was now much above
its original weight. Several times they had to carry one half of their
materials for a mile or more, through a labyrinth of rocks, and then
trudge back to get the other half.

Meantime their power of endurance was diminishing. The frequent wettings,
the shivering nights, the great changes of temperature, the stale and
wretched food, the constant anxiety, were sapping their health and
strength. On the tenth day of their wanderings in the Great Canon Glover
began to complain of rheumatism.

"These cussed draughts!" he groaned. "It's jest like travellin' in a
bellows nozzle."

"Wid the divil himself at the bellys," added Sweeny. "Faix, an' I wish
he'd blow us clane out intirely. I'm gittin' tired o' this same, I am. I
didn't lisht to sarve undher ground."

"Patience, Sweeny," smiled Thurstane. "We must be nearly through the