Roughing it De Luxe | Page 7

try to look down and see where it is going and find you haven't the
nerve to do it--but you can hear it falling from one narrow ledge to
another, picking up other boulders as it goes until there must be a
fair-sized little avalanche of them cascading down. The sound of their
roaring, racketing passage grows fainter and fainter, then dies almost
out, and then there rises up to you from those unutterable depths a dull,
thuddy little sound--those stones have reached the cellar! Then to you
there comes the pleasing reflection that if your mule slipped and you
fell off and were dashed to fragments, they would not be large, mussy,
irregular fragments, but little teeny-weeny fragments, such as would

not bring the blush of modesty to the cheek of the most fastidious.
Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion and
politics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He may slide a
little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with malice
aforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders of
the trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he is
interested in you. A tourist on the cañon's rim a simple tourist is to him
and nothing more; but he has no intention of getting himself hurt.
Instinct has taught that mule it would be to him a highly painful
experience to fall a couple of thousand feet or so and light on a pile of
rocks; and therefore, through motives that are purely selfish, he
studiously refrains from so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote,
"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him," and so on, I
judge he had reference to a mule on a narrow trail.
My mule had one very disconcerting way about him--or, rather, about
her, for she was of the gentler sex. When she came to a particularly
scary spot, which was every minute or so, she would stop dead still. I
concurred in that part of it heartily. But then she would face outward
and crane her neck over the fathomless void of that bottomless pit, and
for a space of moments would gaze steadily downward, with a
despondent droop of her fiddle-shaped head and a suicidal gleam in her
mournful eyes. It worried me no little; and if I had known, at the time,
that she had a German name it would have worried me even more, I
guess. But either the time was not ripe for the rash act or else she
abhorred the thought of being found dead in the company of a mere
tourist, so she did not leap off into space, but restrained herself; and I
was very grateful to her for it. It made a bond of sympathy between us.
On you go, winding on down past the red limestone and the yellow
limestone and the blue sandstone, which is green generally; past huge
bat caves and the big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves of
Nature's making; past stratified millions of crumbling seashells that tell
to geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean that once on a time, when
the world was young and callow, filled this hole brim full; and
presently, when you have begun to piece together the tattered fringes of

your nerves, you realize that the cañon is even more wonderful when
viewed from within than it is when viewed from without. Also, you
begin to notice now that it is most extensively autographed.
Apparently about every other person who came this way remarked to
himself that this cañon was practically completed and only needed his
signature as collaborator to round it out--so he signed it and after that it
was a finished job. Some of them brought down colored chalk and
stencils, and marking pots, and paints and brushes, and cold chisels to
work with, which must have been a lot of trouble, but was worth it--it
does add so greatly to the beauty of the Grand Cañon to find it spangled
over with such names as you could hear paged in almost any
dollar-a-day American-plan hotel. The guide pointed out a spot where
one of these inspired authors climbed high up the face of a white cliff
and, clinging there, carved out in letters a foot long his name; and it
was one of those names that, inscribed upon a register, would
instinctively cause any room clerk to reach for the key to an inside one,
without bath. I regret to state that nothing happened to this person. He
got down safe and sound; it was a great pity, too.
By the Bright Angel Trail it is three hours on a mule to the plateau,
where there are green