The Frontier Boys in the Grand Canyon Part 40

We made our camp where we had landed, resting and repairing our boat.

The river went down as rapidly as it had come up, for the flood had been due to a cloud burst and not to melting snow or a continuous storm.

On the third morning we were all ready to start upon the final round with the Colorado River. Before us was the marble canyon and the great gorge of the Grand Canyon.

Tom and I had recovered our equilibrium by the time we were ready to reembark. We felt reasonably confident of being able to navigate the gorges which were ahead.

"I shall be glad when we get through with this hilarious and irregular life," said Tom. "I don't believe any of us would have started if we could have known what we would have to go through with."

"I would," claimed Jim. "We have to hustle sometimes. But if you had stayed in the peaceful East you would have probably have gone bathing in some mill pond and got a cramp and drowned."

"You can't stop long enough in these darned canyons to get drowned,"

growled Tom.

We all laughed heartily at Tom's complaints. He was never so funny as when he was irritable.

"Another thing," said Tom in conclusion, "I'm not going to give up that search for treasure till we find it."

About noon of the day we started we saw ahead of us the s.h.i.+ning walls of the greatest chasm that we had yet faced.

"Is that the Grand Canyon itself?" I asked.

"No," said Jim, who had been studying the maps carefully during our last stop. "That must be the Marble Canyon. The Little Colorado will come in below there somewhere."

"Is it really marble?" inquired Tom.

"You can see for yourself soon," said Jim.

However, names are deceitful things. It was indeed a marvelous gorge into which we entered. Where the waves of the river had worked, there shone a beautiful greyish marble, cut in curious deep lines by the action of the water, but above the walls were stained a deep red.

There was a ma.s.sive solidness about this marble canyon that made the sandstone gorges appear light and airy. The walls rose in places to over three thousand feet in height.

Sometimes the walls were in thousand-foot terraces, sometimes well nigh perpendicular, at least so it seemed. It was, with all its grandeur, only the entrance hall for the Grand Canyon itself. Its peculiarity was in the sharp thrust out cliffs that rose perpendicularly from the river.

The Little Colorado was well named, for the river itself was but a small stream, but the narrow gorge by which it entered was impressive. It is the mingling of the Little Colorado with Marble Canyon that const.i.tutes the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

But it in reality is not quite so magically logical as that, since from miles below the entrance of the Little Colorado, the canyon walls fall away from the river and the canyon is like a great valley with perpendicular walls removed for several miles on either side of the river, and rising to a height of five thousand feet. Before us lay the great gorge, where the river seemed to lose itself in granite gloom as it wound downwards.

"Let's make a camp in this valley," suggested Jim, "and do some climbing before we take our last sprint down the river."

"I guess it will be our last too," groaned Tom, gloomily.

"Oh shut up!" commanded Jim wearily, giving him a kick with his moccasined foot. "You ought to have lived in the times of Jeremiah."

"You ought to have lived in the Stone Age," retorted Tom, "it would have just suited you."

We made camp near a pleasant looking green stretch of sh.o.r.e and on the following day we started out on our little picnic excursion that consumed several days.

It would take another book to describe what we saw on that trip. After some remarkably hard work and interesting climbing we reached the rim of the canyon, some six thousand feet above the Colorado, that seemed but a narrow rivulet and its long familiar roar was reduced to a gentle purr of sound.

We saw below and around us one of the unequalled panoramas of the world.

Back of us was the black plateau of the great forest land, called the "Kaibab," covered with pines, and beneath our feet was the Grand Canyon itself. Twelve miles from rim to rim and in the chasm were towers, pinnacles, terraced plateaus, palaces and temples, and in the distance, faint and fair formations of beauty and of light.

The coloring was the most wonderful of all. Deep down and far away was the purple gneiss of the gorge, ribboned with granite, then on either side of the river rose the various architectural forms and structures of the canyon.

Based on purple, then a wonderful brown; widest of all the rich red of the sandstone, while the highest pinnacles, peaks and plateaus had a coping of white limestone to correspond with the eight hundred feet of the same rock just below the rim.

But who shall tell of the glories of the sunset as the light fades from the white of the western wall and the vast, vast canyon is filled with the purple shadows!

"Wouldn't it jar you?" exclaimed Jim, the first to break the awestruck silence that bound us, when its immensity first came under our eyes.

"Yes," said Tom, "if you stepped off it would."

Without foreboding, but with grim determination, we left our pleasant camp on the bank of the river and swinging out into the current we headed for the gorge.

Then in a moment we were swallowed up between its jaws as a fly goes into the mouth of a lion. We were enured to dangers and terrible hazards, these we were prepared to meet, nor did we encounter anything equal to the flood of the week before. In that the Colorado had done its worst.

But it was the sombreness and the gloom of that granite gorge that overwhelmed us. It seemed as I have said, as though the river as it plunged and roared downward between the dark and narrow walls, was carrying us down into some nether and long-forgotten h.e.l.l.

We could see little of the glorious upper canyon that was on either side of the gorge whose walls rose perpendicularly above us for fifteen hundred feet.

"One good thing about it," said Tom, "when we get through with this we are through for certain."

"It won't take us long if we keep up this gait," I said, as we swept downward like an express train, and the walls going by as fences do when you look out from a car window. We ran into one terrible rapid where the river was lashed into a ma.s.s of foam from wall to wall.

The waves poured over into our boat nearly swamping us. We pulled out of it alive and the worst was over.

At last, at last, our war worn, battered boat drifted out into the broad sunny reaches of the Colorado. Behind us was the gloom of the labyrinthine, rock bound prison with the gnas.h.i.+ng river within it rus.h.i.+ng ever downward, eager to escape.

We were glad, glad to have come through our terrific experiences alive and though we were weather beaten, well and uninjured.

"Thank Heaven!" exclaimed Jim, as he steered down the broad unhampered river.

So after some time of quiet journeying we came to the end of our trip.

We found a pleasant camping place near a cove where we anch.o.r.ed our faithful boat. How splendidly it had carried us through.

Battered and beaten though it was, still perfectly seaworthy, or to be more exact, riverworthy. It had been our home so many weeks that it seemed to be a part of our lives, and we had a real affection for it, like one has for a faithful dog who has been one's companion through trials and dangers.

One evening we sat around the campfire, underneath the cottonwood trees with the slow moving Colorado in the foreground. We had been talking of home, both in Kansas and York State and also of our old friend the captain, when Jim spoke up:

"Gentlemen of the Order of the Colorado and fellow pioneers," he said, in his most oratorical manner, "I move that we free and untrammeled Americans proceed next to the invasion of Mexico."

This was carried with but one dissenting voice and that was Tom's, but that was to be expected.

At this point I may say that "The Frontier Boys in Mexico, or Mystery Mountain," will be a book of varied and exciting incidents which take place in a wonderfully interesting and remarkable country. And now for a brief time I bid you adios.

As the reader who has been with us all through this trip from the fight with the Apaches to the navigation of the Grand Canyon seems to be a good fellow he is invited to come along too. You may not learn as much of the grandeurs of nature, which have in considerable measure found place in this book, but with exciting adventure it will be replete.