Tales of Lonely Trails | Page 3

grassy
spruce-shaded benches, never for a moment free of the story I had
conceived there. Something of awe and sadness abided with me. I could
not enter into the merry pranks and investigations of my party. Surprise
Valley seemed a part of my past, my dreams, my very self. I left it,
haunted by its loneliness and silence and beauty, by the story it had
given me.
That night we camped at Bubbling Spring, which once had been a
geyser of considerable power. Wetherill told a story of an old Navajo
who had lived there. For a long time, according to the Indian tale, the
old chief resided there without complaining of this geyser that was
wont to inundate his fields. But one season the unreliable waterspout
made great and persistent endeavor to drown him and his people and
horses. Whereupon the old Navajo took his gun and shot repeatedly at
the geyser, and thundered aloud his anger to the Great Spirit. The
geyser ebbed away, and from that day never burst forth again.
[Illustration: WEIRD AND WONDERFUL MONUMENTS IN
MONUMENT VALLEY]
[Illustration: SUNSET ON THE DESERT]

[Illustration: CAVE OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS]
Somewhere under the great bulge of Navajo Mountain I calculated that
we were coming to the edge of the plateau. The white bobbing
pack-horses disappeared and then our extra mustangs. It is no unusual
thing for a man to use three mounts on this trip. Then two of our
Indians disappeared. But Wetherill waited for us and so did Nas ta
Bega, the Piute who first took Wetherill down into Nonnezoshe Boco.
As I came up I thought we had indeed reached the end of the world.
"It's down in there," said Wetherill, with a laugh.
Nas ta Bega made a slow sweeping gesture. There is always something
so significant and impressive about an Indian when he points anywhere.
It is as if he says, "There, way beyond, over the ranges, is a place I
know, and it is far." The fact was that I looked at the Piute's dark,
inscrutable face before I looked out into the void.
My gaze then seemed impelled and held by things afar, a vast yellow
and purple corrugated world of distance, apparently now on a level
with my eyes. I was drawn by the beauty and grandeur of that scene;
and then I was transfixed, almost by fear, by the realization that I dared
to venture down into this wild and upflung fastness. I kept looking afar,
sweeping the three-quarter circle of horizon till my judgment of
distance was confounded and my sense of proportion dwarfed one
moment and magnified the next.
Wetherill was pointing and explaining, but I had not grasped all he
said.
"You can see two hundred miles into Utah," he went on. "That bright
rough surface, like a washboard, is wind-worn rock. Those little lines
of cleavage are canyons. There are a thousand canyons down there, and
only a few have we been in. That long purple ragged line is the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado. And there, that blue fork in the red, that's
where the San Juan comes in. And there's Escalante Canyon."
I had to adopt the Indian's method of studying unlimited spaces in the

desert--to look with slow contracted eyes from near to far.
The pack-train and the drivers had begun to zigzag down a long slope,
bare of rock, with scant strips of green, and here and there a cedar. Half
a mile down, the slope merged in what seemed a green level. But I
knew it was not level. This level was a rolling plain, growing darker
green, with lines of ravines and thin, undefined spaces that might be
mirage. Miles and miles it swept and rolled and heaved, to lose its
waves in apparent darker level. Round red rocks stood isolated. They
resembled huge grazing cattle. But as I gazed these rocks were
strangely magnified. They grew and grew into mounds, castles, domes,
crags, great red wind-carved buttes. One by one they drew my gaze to
the wall of upflung rock. I seemed to see a thousand domes of a
thousand shapes and colors, and among them a thousand blue clefts,
each of which was a canyon.
Beyond this wide area of curved lines rose another wall, dwarfing the
lower; dark red, horizon-long, magnificent in frowning boldness, and
because of its limitless deceiving surfaces incomprehensible to the gaze
of man. Away to the eastward began a winding ragged blue line,
looping back upon itself, and then winding away again, growing wider
and bluer. This line was San Juan Canyon. I followed that blue line all
its length, a hundred miles, down toward the west where it joined a
dark purple shadowy cleft. And this was the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado.