The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 3

these canons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omni buses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. This erosion, proceeding with a sort of fateful regularity, has come to be a matter of constant and growing interest. Means have been found to measure its progress just as a scale has been arranged to measure the rising of the Nile or to gauge the draught of an ocean liner. In this case the unit of meas urement is called the "story." Ten years ago the most rushing and irrepressible of the tor rents which devastate Chicago had not worn its bed to a greater depth than that indicated by seven of these "stories." This depth has since increased to eight to ten to fourteen- to six teen, until some of the leading avenues of activ ity promise soon to become little more than mere obscure trails half lost between the bases of per pendicular precipices.
High above this architectural upheaval rise yet other structures in crag-like isolation. El Capitan is duplicated time and again both in bulk and in stature, and around him the floating spray of the Bridal Veil is woven by the breezes of lake and prairie from the warp of soot-flakes and the woof of damp-drenched smoke.
The explorer who has climbed to the shoulder of one of these great captains and has found one of the thinnest folds in the veil may readily make out the nature of the surrounding country. The rugged and erratic plateau of the Bad Lands lies before him in all its hideousness and impracticability. It is a wild tract full of sudden falls, unexpected rises, precipitous dislocations. The high and the low are met together. The big and the little alternate in a rapid and illogi cal succession. Its perilous trails are followed successfully by but few by a lineman, perhaps, who is balanced on a cornice, by a roofer astride some dizzy gable, by a youth here and there whose early apprehension of the main chance and the multiplication table has stood him in good stead. This country is a treeless country if we overlook the "forest of chimneys "com prised in a bird s-eye view of any great city, and if we are unable to detect any botanical analo gies in the lofty articulated iron funnels whose ramifying cables reach out wherever they can, to fasten wherever they may. It is a shrubless country if we give no heed to the gnarled car pentry of the awkward frame-works which carry the telegraph, and which are set askew on such dizzy corners as the course of the wires may compel. It is an arid country if we overlook the numberless tanks that squat on the high angles of alley walls, or if we fail to see the little pools of tar and gravel that ooze and shim mer in the summer sun on the roofs of old-fash ioned buildings -of the humbler sort. It is an airless country if by air we mean the mere com bination of oxygen and nitrogen which is com monly indicated by that name. For here the medium of sight, sound, light, and life becomes largely carbonaceous, and the remoter peaks of this mighty yet unprepossessing landscape loom up grandly, but vaguely, through swathing mists of coal-smoke.
From such conditions as these along with the Tacoma, the Monadnock, and a great host of other modern monsters towers the Clifton. From the beer-hall in its basement to the bar ber-shop just under its roof the Clifton stands full eighteen stories tall. Its hundreds of win dows glitter with multitudinous letterings in gold and in silver, and on summer afternoons its awnings flutter score on score in the tepid breezes that sometimes come up from Indiana. Four ladder-like constructions which rise sky ward stage by stage promote the agility of the clambering hordes that swarm within it, and ten elevators devices unknown to the real, ab original inhabitants ameliorate the daily cliffclimbing for the frail of physique and the pressed for time.
The tribe inhabiting the Clifton is large and rather heterogeneous. All told, it numbers about four thousand souls. It includes bankers, capitalists, lawyers, "promoters 3; brokers in bonds, stocks, pork, oil, mortgages; real-estate people and railroad people and insurance people life, fire, marine, accident; a host of princi pals, agents, middlemen, clerks, cashiers, stenographers, and errand-boys; and the necessary force of engineers, janitors, scrub -women, and elevator-hands.
All these thousands gather daily around their own great camp-fire. This fire heats