CHAPTER V.

PERIL IN THE GRAND CANYON

Excited and expectant travelers were many on the Santa Fe railroad, but Roger felt that he had never met a more enthusiastic group than those who dined at the long low mission-like hotel Fray Marcos at Williams, Ariz., waiting for the train to Grand Canyon. And of all these none had been more a-tingle with anticipation than the boy, as the train, passing by the station of Hopi--the very name recording that strange tribe of Arizona Indians--ran through Apex and began to slow up for the last stop.

Throughout the past two or three hours of the trip, all the passengers had been speaking of the great sights that awaited them, and guidebooks and photograph collections without number had been scanned, bringing interest to fever heat. But in spite of all this preparatory ardor, those who had visited the Grand Canyon before and those whose friends had done so, bore testimony to the universal belief that nothing, no estimate of the wonders of that land, however extravagant, could discount the reality.

It was a little after four o'clock on the afternoon of the last day in May as the train drew into the station, and guides met the passengers ready to conduct them direct to the brink of the Canyon that they might gain their first sight of it. Roger's very toes were aching with the desire to follow them, particularly as he was not on duty until the following day, but still he felt that he was on government service and that he ought to report for duty at the appointed place immediately on his arrival. Then, the boy argued, should there be no one to meet him, his time would be his own until the following morning, and he could enjoy the pleasures of sight-seeing without feeling that he had in any way been neglectful of the strictest interpretation of his orders. His trunk had been checked through, so Roger, refusing the solicitations of the guides, picked up the small hand-grip he had carried for the necessities of the journey and set his face resolutely to the hotel.

Turning to view the country about him, Roger was as much disappointed as amazed to find how flat and uninteresting it seemed. Indeed, there was nothing in the region to suggest that a canyon was anywhere in the vicinity. So far as he could see, on either side of the railroad track up which he had come was a level treeless prairie, and in the direction whither the tourists had gone, there was naught to be seen but this same slowly rising plateau, which, a little further on, seemed to be bounded by a slight rise. The boy knew that the Canyon must be on the other side of this eminence, but there was nothing to bespeak its presence, not a sign to awake the consciousness that a few hundred yards away lay a view of the greatest scenic wonder that any man had beheld, primitive and untouched as since the days that antediluvian monsters roamed the plains whereon he now was walking.

When he arrived at the hotel, Roger walked straight to the desk.

"Is Mr. Masseth here?" he asked the clerk.

The latter, a being largely characterized by shirt front, gestured the boy to a slightly built man, sitting in the rotunda of the hotel reading a newspaper with an intensity of concentration which Roger immediately conceived to be typical of the man. He turned instantly at the boy's approach, however.

"Mr. Masseth?" queried the lad.

The reader rose with a quick though courteous motion of assent.

"I was told to give this letter to you," the boy continued. "I understand it contains my instructions to report to you. My name is Roger Doughty."

"I am extremely pleased," said the older man with a slight foreign timbre in his voice, "to be able to welcome you. I felt assured, from what Mr. Herold said when he wrote to me, that you would be here to-day, as he suggested that I should find you punctual. It is of the greatest service never to lose a minute, unless indeed, it be taken for a rest."

"I don't want to lose minutes, I want to make the most of them, and Mr. Field told me that I should never be losing any time as long as I was with you."

"In that case," replied the boy's new leader, with a quick smile, "what would you like to do now? You have never seen the Grand Canyon before?"

"Never!"

"And you are anxious to do so, of course?"

"You bet!" answered Roger. Then, with a laugh, "I pretty nearly mutinied on my first day; I came near going over with the tourists instead of coming here to report."

"I am quite glad that you did not," said the topographer, "for I should like to be with you the first time you see the Canyon in order to be able to tell you what it all means and how it came about. You would probably try to guess at the reason of things and you would guess wrong, and a false first impression is a bad thing, because it is so hard to take out afterward."

"I'd very much rather find out right at first," answered the boy.

"Very well, then, suppose we walk to a near-by point, where an unusually good view of the Canyon can be observed."

Taking up his hat, as he spoke, he waited while the boy arranged for his grip to be taken to his room, and then without further parley started toward the brink of the chasm with quick, nervous strides which taxed Roger's walking powers to the utmost. They walked on to the rounded hill, Roger so full of excitement that he could hardly answer his companion's questions about his former work on the Survey, and just as they were about to cross the summit of the slope, Masseth touched him on the arm, holding him back.

"Wait just a moment," he said. "Look back over the country and tell me what you see."

Roger turned. "I don't see very much," he said. "I think it's pretty flat except for a range of hills to the east, away off, and that to the south the ground seems to be falling away."

"Is the fall long?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said the boy, "but I suppose we must be quite high up, for the road has been on a gradual incline for miles and miles."

Masseth took a few steps onward.

"You noticed," he said, "how gradual that slope was. Now," pausing as they crossed the ridge, "this is not so gradual." He smiled at the boy's speechless wonderment.

Roger found himself standing not three yards away from a drop of 6,800 feet, the first couple of thousand sheer almost immediately below him. So near that he could have leaped to it, rose a fantastic pinnacle, elaborately carved, springing from a base 1,200 feet below. Beyond this, seamed and jagged, thrown across this cloven chasm as though in defiance of any natural supposing, flung a blood-red escarpment, taking the breath away by the very audacity of its reckless scenic emphasis. Further, again, in unsoftened splashes and belts of naked color, mesa and plateau, peak and crag, shouldering butte and towering barrier, through a vista of miles seeming to stretch to the very world's end, impelled a breathless awe.

And, in Titanic mockery of pygmy human work, the glowing rocks appeared grotesquely, yet powerfully scornful of the greatest buildings of mankind. Minaret and spire, minster and dome, facade and campanile, stood guard over the riven precipices, and not to be outdone by man, nature had there erected temple and coliseum, pyramid and vast cathedral, castle and thrice-walled fastness, until it seemed to the boy that there was thrown before his eyes a hysterical riot of every dream and nightmare of architecture that the world had ever conceived.

"But--but, I never thought it was anything like this!" exclaimed Roger.

The older man repressed a smile at the triteness of the speech, which is that usually educed from every new beholder of the scene.

"What do you think of it?" he said.

"It doesn't seem real," answered the boy. "It's like the places you see in your dreams that you know can't be so, and what's more, it's like one of those places all set on fire with flames of different colors."

The topographer nodded.

"But what you will find still more strange," he said, "is that it is never twice the same. If you move a few yards away"--he suited the action to the word--"it looks quite different, and even if you stay still, under the changing light new shapes appear."

"That's right," affirmed the boy. "From where we stood before, I could see a huge fortress, only it was a vivid purple, and now it's gone. And I suppose those really aren't richly carved churches over there," pointing with his finger, "but a fellow would bet that they were."

"Churches without any congregations, and whose only preacher is the thunder, but they do look like temples and are so named. But truly they have been carved, though not by human hands."

"By what, then?" asked the boy.

"By wind and water," was the reply, "which have made and unmade many a thousand square mile of the earth's surface. If you will notice," he went on, "jagged and pointed as those peaks are, from this side clear across to the other, not one of them rises above the level on which you are standing or rather, above the level of the opposite side of the Canyon, which is a little higher, the slope being continued across. So, you see, you must not think of these like mountains as being built up, but of gorges as being cut down."

"And has the river cut it all down?"

"The river started it, and then of course every little stream helps, and indeed, every rain adds another fissure to the carving."

"But what makes such curious shapes?" asked the boy, still considerably puzzled.

"The relative hardness of the different kinds of rock," was the reply. "Not to seem too technical, the top stratum, that is to say the rock immediately under the soil of this plateau, while quite hard, is very thin, and underneath it are various other layers of rock, some fairly hard and others very soft. The Colorado River has a very swift current, and once it had cut through the hard rock on the top it quickly ate its way downward through the soft limestones and sandstones below. But some strata were quite hard and these, resisting the water, formed the terraces which you see on every hand."

"But I still don't understand," said the boy, "what it is that gives them such curious shapes. I can see how a hard rock would make a terrace, but why aren't the lines all regular?"

"Just because it has been done by water. Sandstone, you know, is made of sand, pressed, and sand is all sorts of rocks ground down fine. So every handful of sand may contain particles of a dozen different kinds of rock, and if there was any difference in the hardness of the rock of which the sandstone was made, or any difference in the pressure while it was being made, each difference would show up by its greater or less resistance to the action of wind and water. So, you see this bit is hard and cuts slowly, that bit soft, and cuts rapidly, giving a carved effect."

"But if it all follows a regular rule, why does it look so unnatural?"

"That is easy," replied his informant. "The strata are regular--that is what makes the masses look like buildings done by hand, there is a sense of proportion, but they look unnatural because the ground plan is capricious, the water having found its way to the bottom of its thousand canyons by the irregular and complicated way of least resistance."

"And the colors seem so glaring and so strange!"

"I will explain those to you after dinner," said the topographer, "and, by the way, it is nearly time we returned to the hotel or we shall be late. I can show you how the various reds are due to iron in the rock--you remember how a rusty nail stains everything red?--and other iron compounds give the green, while the blues of the slates and the dark belts of hornblende all play their part."

Masseth was as good as his word and all through the time spent in the dining-room he interested the boy in the country by his vivid descriptions of how all these rocks had first been made, then reduced to sand and built up again, and how the Colorado River was fast tearing them down and carrying them away to be built up somewhere else in some other way.

"Then geology isn't all over!" exclaimed Roger in surprise. "I always thought of it just as a sort of history of things that happened a great while ago."

"Geology is happening right along," said Masseth, "and that's why it is so necessary to do this work and find out both what has been and what is going to be, even though it is both difficult and arduous."

"But of all the work in the Survey," suggested Roger, thinking of the apparent inaccessibility of the Canyon as he had seen it, "I should think this Grand Canyon work the most difficult and dangerous of all."

The older man shook his head.

"It is not dangerous," he said, "unless carelessness is shown, because the most lofty buttes, simply being cut down from the level plateau, have their crests just that height, so that they can be fairly well mapped by a determination of their bases. But, though you can't see it from the top here, those bases are fearfully irregular and a cliff forty feet high may take miles to go round. You have noticed that there are plenty of terraces, so that in many places you can walk up or down the Canyon as on a made road, but that would help you not a whit in getting across."

"Well, it is difficult, anyway," said the boy.

"Extremely so. The intense color, the glowing rays of the sun seldom shielded by any clouds, the lack of vegetation and the absence of landmarks all help to confuse the idea of distance, so that you cannot trust to your eyes to map a point until you have been there."

"And how do you get there?" queried the boy in wonderment.

"Climbing. There is an Indian trail on this side that helps a little, and there are three roads down to the river on this side and one on the north. This one through trail, called the Cameron or Tourist trail, has been partly rendered passable, so that by herculean effort and with trusted and well-trained animals it is possible to cross. Usually, however, the trail is left in loneliness, for there is absolutely no traffic between Utah and Arizona. Except for a little corner in each, these States are more widely separated than if an ocean rolled between them."

"And how about these corners?"

"Well, Utah can get to hers by taking a little trouble, but the northwest corner of Arizona is No Man's Land, so far as any jurisdiction goes."

"But you say animals can be made to tackle those trails. I should have thought that kind of work would kill any animal that tried it."

"It's pretty hard to kill a burro," answered Masseth, "and I've never lost one. Indeed, in all the Survey work I've done in the Grand Canyon, I've only had one accident, and that was a case absolutely unavoidable. I lost one of my favorite horses that time."

"How did it happen, Mr. Masseth?" asked Roger.

"It was on the north side of the Canyon," began the topographer, "and I was working on an outlying butte with my assistant. We had made quite a number of bench marks and I was working out the contours--those are the lines on a map which show the height or elevation of any point--while my assistant was sitting beside me, making out some of the necessary calculations. We were working out from a little side camp, the two of us, the rest of the party being at headquarters, several miles away. I was drawing in at full speed, because I wanted to change from that side station that evening, and for a couple of hours I suppose we had not exchanged a word, except with relation to figures.

"Before coming out on that sun-baked exposed butte, I had tied the animals--a pack-mule, my riding mare, and the assistant's horse--to the branch of a tree. Suddenly, as it afterwards appeared, the other fellow heard a sound as of a fall and went to see what it was. He was gone so long that I noticed his absence. When he returned I waited for him to volunteer an explanation but apparently he did not want to disturb me, so I said, questioningly:

"'Well?'"

"'Only two of them there now,'" he replied. 'Bella's gone over the edge. Neck's broken, so there's no use doing anything.'

"Now Uncle Sam, you know, is always willing to stand for accidents that can't be helped, but he's got to know all about it, and while I realized that it would really matter little in the long run, I was sure that the department would feel better satisfied if the manner of the accident were set forth. So I put away my pencil, folded up the plane table, and went to investigate. It was as puzzling a thing to decide as I ever saw. The tree was at least twenty yards from the brink of the precipice, although the ground sloped fairly steeply to the edge.

"When I arrived there I found the other two animals tied to the branch, as I had left them, and apparently undisturbed. The ground, however, between the tree and the edge of the chasm, was torn up with hoof marks and the struggles of an animal that evidently had fallen to the ground, and the spoor from the tree to the Canyon's edge was easily traced. Of the animal, I could at first find no evidence, but my assistant touched me on the arm.

"'Here, Mr. Masseth,' he said, 'you can see Bella from here.'

"Sure enough, on rounding the corner of a pinnacle which stood out a little distance from the edge, the body of the mare could be seen about one hundred and seventy-five feet down, lying on a sharply pitching bank of talus--that is, debris of rock and dust, fallen from the overhanging cliff above. It was still a wonder to me how the mare fell, and as she had been wearing a brand-new halter, this in a country where it is easier to get beast than harness, I told my assistant that I was going down to secure the halter and also to find out, if I could, what had been the cause of the accident.

"I think that was about as nasty a piece of climbing as I ever had. It would never come about in the regular course of business, you see, because we don't work that way, but I was going down to get that brute, no matter what labor it cost. At last I managed to make my way down to the point where she was lying. There, after studying the position in which she must have fallen, I gained some idea of the manner in which it had come about. Bella was from the ranches, where, you know, an animal is not muscle-bound like your eastern horses, and in trying to scratch her head--where possibly a fly had settled--with her off fore-leg, the calk of her shoe must have caught in the neck-strap of the halter, and of course, she could not get it out.

"The poor beast probably stood as long as she could on three legs, but the posture must have been cramped and painful after a few moments and she fell heavily, breaking the rope of the halter as she did so. Then, while lying on the ground, floundering about in an effort to free her foot from the thraldom of the halter-strap, she must have slipped nearer and nearer to the edge and then suddenly gone over, with her hind-foot still fast in the strap.

"Since I had got so far, though I did not much relish doing it, I determined to take off the halter, and at least save that out of the wreck. But you can readily see that the halter had been drawn fearfully tight, and I could not get slack enough to unfasten the buckle. At last I gave a hearty wrench, and was just about to be able to slip the prong of the buckle through the hole, when the insecure talus on which I was standing, and on which the animal had been resting, began to slide. Fortunately I am fairly quick on my feet, and in two or three springs I reached a little outjutting terrace. But I had scarcely reached that point of safety when poor Bella went over the edge another seventy-five feet into the chasm.

"That made me mad. I had come down a very nasty piece of climbing to get that halter, and I was bound to secure that bit of leather if I had to scramble down the gorge to the very bed of the river itself. So, as soon as I could find a way to start down, I went on and reached the mare, this time resting on a wide ledge where I could disentangle the halter with but very little trouble.

"I had gained the object of my quest, I had found out the cause of the accident to the horse, and I had recovered the halter, but in the achievement of these purposes I found myself two hundred feet down the gorge and I knew that it would be a great deal harder to get up that distance than it had been to get down, and even the latter had been no easy matter. Of course, my assistant was up above, and had been watching the proceedings, all the while, so that I knew he would get at me from the top in the course of time.

"I was anxious, however, to get back the way that I had come without taking a long trip to one of the side canyons, and after losing some time, and also some skin from knees and elbows and other parts of my body, I got back to the place where the horse had first lain. My assistant dropped me a rope--there is always a long rope carried by each party--and I climbed up that rope."

"Swarmed up a rope a hundred and seventy-five feet high!" ejaculated Roger, then, with a whistle, he added, "that's an awful climb."

"It was not a straight hand over hand climb, my boy," answered Masseth quietly. "You must remember that all those walls are in terraces and every other line of strata would give a ledge. Of course, in some parts they were overhanging and that made it all the harder, but there were plenty of places to rest on the way up and in due course I reached the top. That was the first misadventure, and I hope it will be the last in any of my camps in Grand Canyon work."

"And what part of the work are you doing now, Mr. Masseth?" queried the boy.

"I was just waiting for you to complete the party," was the reply. "We are going to tackle the Tourist's trail, that is the one I was telling you about, and will go up the other side. Then, from the north side, I will pick out a number of points which I want you--with other members of the party--to occupy. You will then do some work under my assistant, while I cross back to this side, and on an appointed day we will strike a level across the nine-miles gap."

"Then we will be working together though miles apart?" asked the boy in surprise.

"Yes, and months apart, too."

"But how in the world can you do that?" was the amazed response. "Do you carry a wireless telegraph outfit in your vest pocket, Mr. Masseth? Is there anything the Survey can't do?"

"You seem to think," responded the chief with a smile, "that the race of wizards has been reborn and christened the Geological Survey, as a visiting diplomat once said of us."

"Well, pretty nearly," answered the boy.

"We're not quite that," admitted the other, "but," with a smile of mystification, "I do carry a little device by which I can make use of a system of wireless telegraphy which was in existence thousands of years ago."

"And can I see it?"

"Certainly," replied the topographer, and drawing his hand from his pocket, he showed it open to the boy.

"That's just a looking-glass," cried Roger in disappointment, having expected to see some delicate and ingenious piece of intricate machinery.

"Just a piece of looking-glass," assented his chief. "What then?"

"But how do you work it? What can you do with that?"

"That, my boy," answered the older man, "is one of the very many things you will learn while you are in and about the Grand Canyon."