The River and I | Page 9

a
mile in length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one, also,
does nothing at all, and in a beautifully irregular way. Somehow it
made me think of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon, swinging out into
the open parched country. We knew all this turbulence to be merely the
river's bow before the great stunt.
As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail
that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind
us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the
hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! For an
hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders increased--like the
undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were approaching the
Great Falls of the Missouri. There were no sign posts in that lonesome
tract; no one of whom to ask the way. Little did we need direction. The
voice of thunder crying in the desert led us surely.
A half-hour more of clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up
sun-baked watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged
slope of a bluff; and soon we stood upon a rocky ledge with the
thunders beneath us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp
of the cliff. I lay down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two
hundred feet below me--straight down as a pebble drops--a watery
Inferno raged, and far-flung whirlwinds all but exhausted with the
dizzy upward reach, whisked cool, invisible mops of mist across my
face.
Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between
soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal
tons rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the
long bent crest--shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's
back--smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river
was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts,
sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering
sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in
showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.

[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM CLIFF ABOVE.]
[Illustration: GREAT FALLS FROM THE FRONT.]
I caught myself tightly gripping the ledge and shrinking with a
shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle
all memory of sound--and left only the silent universe with myself and
this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved
it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so
magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain,
or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a
thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in
the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with only the
stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to behold.
Thundering out its message into the waste places, careless of
audiences--like a Master! Bully, grizzled old Master-Bard singing--as
most of them do--to empty benches! And it had been doing that ten
thousand thousand years, and would do so for ten thousand thousand
more, and never pause for plaudits. I suspect the soul of old Homer did
that--and is still doing it, somehow, somewhere. After all there isn't
much difference between really tremendous things--Homer or
waterfalls or thunderstorms--is there? It's only a matter of how things
happen to be big.
I was absent-mindedly chasing some big thundering line of Sophocles
when Bill, the little Cornishman, ran in between me and the evasive
line: "Lord! what a waste of power!"
There is some difference in temperaments. Most men, I fancy, would
have enjoyed a talk with a civil engineer upon that ledge. I should have
liked to have Shelley there, myself! It's the difference between poetry
and horse-power, dithyrambics and dynamos, Keats and Kipling! What
is the energy exerted by the Great Falls of the Missouri? How many
horse-power did Shelley fling into the creation of his _West Wind_?
How many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it
broke? Something may be left to the imagination!
We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn

incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the
crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it--a novel sense of
discovering a natural wonder for ourselves. We seemed the first men
who had ever been there: that was the most gripping thing about it.
Aloof, stupendous, terriffic, staggering in the intensity of its wild
beauty, you reach it by a trail. There are no 'busses running and you
can't buy a sandwich or a peanut or a glass of beer