Tales of Lonely Trails | Page 4

My eye swept along with that winding mark, farther and
farther to the west, until the cleft, growing larger and closer, revealed
itself as a wild and winding canyon. Still farther westward it split a vast
plateau of red peaks and yellow mesas. Here the canyon was full of
purple smoke. It turned, it closed, it gaped, it lost itself and showed
again in that chaos of a million cliffs. And then it faded, a mere purple
line, into deceiving distance.
I imagined there was no scene in all the world to equal this. The
tranquillity of lesser spaces was here not manifest. This happened to be
a place where so much of the desert could be seen and the effect was
stupendous Sound, movement, life seemed to have no fitness here.
Ruin was there and desolation and decay. The meaning of the ages was

flung at me. A man became nothing. But when I gazed across that
sublime and majestic wilderness, in which the Grand Canyon was only
a dim line, I strangely lost my terror and something came to me across
the shining spaces.
Then Nas ta Bega and Wetherill began the descent of the slope, and the
rest of us followed. No sign of a trail showed where the base of the
slope rolled out to meet the green plain. There was a level bench a mile
wide, then a ravine, and then an ascent, and after that, rounded ridge
and ravine, one after the other, like huge swells of a monstrous sea.
Indian paint brush vied in its scarlet hue with the deep magenta of
cactus. There was no sage. Soap weed and meager grass and a bunch of
cactus here and there lent the green to that barren, and it was green only
at a distance.
Nas ta Bega kept on at a steady gait. The sun climbed. The wind rose
and whipped dust from under the mustangs. There is seldom much talk
on a ride of this nature. It is hard work and everybody for himself.
Besides, it is enough just to see; and that country is conducive to
silence. I looked back often, and the farther out on the plain we rode the
higher loomed the plateau we had descended; and as I faced ahead
again, the lower sank the red-domed and castled horizon to the fore.
It was a wild place we were approaching. I saw piñon patches under the
circled walls. I ceased to feel the dry wind in my face. We were already
in the lee of a wall. I saw the rock squirrels scampering to their holes.
Then the Indians disappeared between two rounded corners of cliff.
I rode round the corner into a widening space thick with cedars. It
ended in a bare slope of smooth rock. Here we dismounted to begin the
ascent. It was smooth and hard, though not slippery. There was not a
crack. I did not see a broken piece of stone. Nas ta Bega and Wetherill
climbed straight up for a while and then wound round a swell, to turn
this way and that, always going up. I began to see similar mounds of
rock all around me, of every shape that could be called a curve. There
were yellow domes far above and small red domes far below. Ridges
ran from one hill of rock to another. There were no abrupt breaks, but
holes and pits and caves were everywhere, and occasionally deep down,

an amphitheater green with cedar and piñon. We found no vestige of
trail on those bare slopes.
Our guides led to the top of the wall, only to disclose to us another wall
beyond, with a ridged, bare, and scalloped depression between. Here
footing began to be precarious for both man and beast. Our mustangs
were not shod and it was wonderful to see their slow, short, careful
steps. They knew a great deal better than we what the danger was. It
has been such experiences as this that have made me see in horses
something besides beasts of burden. In the ascent of the second slope it
was necessary to zigzag up, slowly and carefully, taking advantage of
every bulge and depression.
Then before us twisted and dropped and curved the most dangerous
slopes I had ever seen. We had reached the height of the divide and
many of the drops on this side were perpendicular and too steep for us
to see the bottom.
[Illustration: THIS IMMENSE CAVE WOULD HOLD TRINITY
CHURCH. IN IT LIES THE RUINED CLIFF DWELLING CALLED
BETATAKIN]
At one bad place Wetherill and Nas ta Bega, with Joe Lee, a Mormon
cowboy with us, were helping one of the pack-horses named Chub. On
the steepest part of this slope Chub fell and began to