by Zane Grey
He put the letter aside, and opened the second packet, larger, flatter, more strongly wrapped, incased in pasteboard. He expected to find a photograph and was not disappointed. But before he opened the cover out dropped an envelope containing snap-shot pictures of Marian taken at Mesa with her own camera. The best picture was one of her riding the white mustang he had given her. They were all good, yet not one of them seemed like the image he had in memory. The desert was hard on Marian. But when Nophaie opened the large envelope he saw a beautiful likeness of the fair face he loved and remembered so well. This was a fine photograph, taken in Philadelphia, probably some time after he had left the East.
“Benow di cleash!” he murmured, and all the white flower-like fairness seemed to flash in a beautiful light from that pictured face. Gazing, he forgot everything for a while.
When he went back to his packages he found books, magazines, late newspapers, pads and pencils and envelopes, a small hunter’s sewing kit, a box of medicines, bandages, candy, nuts and cakes, and last of all, a watch with radium numerals, and a buckskin fob decorated with Nopah buttons. She had not forgotten to include in all this loving munificence some token of the Indian. That thrilled him as nothing else had.
One by one he handled these gifts and pondered over the effect they had upon him. Beyond peradventure of doubt these established the connection between him and the world of white people. Eighteen years of his life, the forming and fixing period, had developed to such things as these, and not those of the red man. He might starve naked in a cave of the canyons, with nothing representative of the white race near him, but that could not change facts. He loved Marian Warner. Her gifts made him happy. The isolated solitudes of the desert were good for his soul and body, but they could never wholly satisfy.
CHAPTER XVI
NOPHAIE CARRIED MARIAN’S letter to his favorite resting and dreaming place. Not on the heights did he care to read her message, but in the amber shadow of the Silent Walls.
This place was a strange one, a narrow section of canyon, where the west wall leaned to meet the cavernous eastern wall, the lofty red rims of which showed a blue ribbon of sky above. Here the canyon turned sharply to the left and then to the right, giving a strange impression of stupendous leaning walls. At the base of the cavernous cliff ran the murmuring stream of clear green water. Banks of moss and grass stood out from the wall, dry, odorous, and gray. The leaves of the cottonwoods were not yet devoid of their autumn hue. And sound here was weird, hollow, ringing, melodious, and echoes magnified all. Nophaie found his accustomed seat and with mounting beat of heart he opened Marian’s letter. Was he really there — lonely outcast Nopah in the solitude of a silent canyon — holding in his hands the letter of a noble and loving woman of a hated race?
Dearest Nophaie:
Greetings on your Christmas Day! I could not be happy without sending to you my greeting, and love, and my gifts. May these find you well. May they assure you at least of the constancy of Benow di cleash. I shall not be able even on Christmas Day to believe wholly in the spirit: “Peace on earth — good will to man.” Not when the one I love, whom I know is worthy, lies hidden in the wilds, persecuted by men of my color!
If I could write you a whole volume I would never be able to crowd in all. My dismissal came quite some time after your visit. In fact, I ran the office until Blucher and Morgan came out of seclusion. Then I got the “steam- roller” all right and without my month’s pay. I’m grateful for that, because it gives me an excuse to go back to the office, which I have done regularly since I came here to stay with the Paxtons. They are very kind to me, and allow me to pay my board. I help in the trading store sometimes and thus I keep up my study of the Indians. Here I get another angle on the reservation.
As far as I am able to tell, nothing has yet leaked out in Mesa about that football match you had with Blucher and Morgan. I will never get over that day. Never will I trust myself again. If you were an Indian, I was a savage. I just swelled and tingled and burned with fiendish glee every time you kicked one of the — footballs. My only regret rises from the fact that I never saw you play real football in the college games that made you famous.
My last interview with Blucher and Morgan was a nightmare. Blucher was poison. Morgan tried to intimidate me and drive me off the reservation. He said- -but never mind what he said. The Indian police have returned from their search for you, I imagine. You will do well to lie low for awhile. There is a seething volcano under this particular part of the reservation. The Woltersons expect dismissal any day. All communication to Wolterson comes through the superintendent. Why, I could run this reservation better than it is run. The whole Indian Service, if judged by this arm of it, is merely a gigantic political machine. But that you know.
I suspect that Blucher is greatly concerned about the possibility of the U. S. being drawn into war with Germany. There is indeed a grave possibility of that very thing. You will see the latest news in the papers I send. These came to- day with the mail carrier from Flagerstown. Read them carefully. You may be a Nopah, but you are also an American. One of the truest of Americans — the red- blooded species. German militarism threatens not only the peace of the world, but also the freedom. If war is declared I trust you will tell the truth to every Nopah on this reservation. For I absolutely know that Blucher will oppose any Indian help to the United States army. I read a letter he wrote to a German in New York. He was typing it himself and when some one called him I read it. If I could only have secured a copy of it or have remembered it. But I was excited — shocked. Blucher is all German. If war is declared the situation here on this reservation will be a terrible one. Think how to meet that, Nophaie.
I have seen Gekin Yashi but once. She was in the school yard near the fence as I passed on my way here from Woltersons’. I got close to her before she saw me. Her face has altered strangely. It gave me a pang. For a second I felt that I could tear and rend.... When she espied me she ran. I called, but she paid no heed.
The Indian girl who was put in the maternity hospital here recently, gave birth to a child. She will be sent to Riverside — separated from her baby under the mandate of studying for five years before she can have it. Indian women love their babies. I hear Blucher has sent the father to jail. Various and weird the law of this reservation school!
I have no plans. I am waiting. You may be sure I’ll not leave the reservation. I might be taken off, but they’ll have to carry me. This winter is no great problem. I need rest and I want to write some. Later, if nothing comes up here, I might go out to Kaidab. In the spring I hope to see you, I want you to know that I meant what I said in Blucher’s office the day you confronted him and Morgan there. I would be happy to marry you and share what I have with you, and your life and work among your people. I have the means for a start. And we can work. I ask only that we spend some part of each year in California or the East. I have vanity enough not to let myself dry up in this desert air and blow away!
Time and trouble change character, do they not? I am the stronger for what has come to me out here. The desert is terrible. It destroys and then builds. I never knew what light was — the wonderful sun — and wind and dust and heat — stars and night and silence — the great emptiness — until I came to the desert. Perhaps so with love!
Somehow I will endure the long silence, for you must not risk writing me yet. I will dream of you — see you among the rocks. Always, as long as I live, rocks and walls of stone will have thrilling and sad significance for me.
Benow di cleash.
Nophaie gazed in seeming terror at the stupendous wall of stone opposite. He could not see either of its corners or its base. Solid rock, impenetrable and immovable and insurmountable! The temptation that confronted him now was just as much a wall, a barrier, an overpowering weight.
Benow di cleash loved him. She would marry him. She would share all she had as she would share his life. Live with him! Belong to him alone!
The fact was a staggering blow. H
ere under the accusing eyes of his silent walls he had feeling that no other place could inspire. Loneliness had augmented his hunger for a mate. Nature importuned him for her right. And suddenly Nophaie found himself stripped bare of all ideals, chivalries, duties, of the false sophistries of his education, of the useless fetters of his unbelief.
Human being, man, Indian, savage, primitive beast — so he retrograded in the scale. As a human he aspired to martyrdom, as a man he sacrificed love, as an Indian he steeped his soul in noble exaltation, as a savage he felt only the fierce race of hot blood, as a primitive beast he struggled in the throes of hereditary instincts, raw and wild, ungovernable — the imperious and inscrutable law of nature.
While he lay motionless on that mossy bank it seemed the elemental — the natural — the mindless automaton of living flesh must win. There was nothing else in life. This staggering bundle of nerves, vessels, organs, blood, and bone that constituted his body had millions of cells, each one of which clamored for its right to completion, expression, reproduction. Death to cell, organ, body, individual, but life to the species! This instinct that Nophaie strove to kill was the strangest of all forces in the universe.
One terrible moment Nophaie lay there under the walls that seemed to thunder the meaning of nature. Then he sprang up to force this living body of his, this vehicle he abhorred, this beating, burning frame of blood- veined muscle, into violent and sustained effort, into exhausting physical activity that must bring subjugation of the instincts which threatened his downfall. He must win now — in this hour — or lose forever. Thought, reflection, reason, argument — these faded in his consciousness like pale vapors of mist when the blazing sun rose. Before he could think he must subdue something in him, hydra- headed, multiple-lunged, insatiate instinct to project his life into another life. Nophaie refused that species of self-preservation. If it was instinct that maddened him and instinct that he fought, it was also instinct that sent him out to move, to run, to climb.
There were none of his race to see him, to bring their medicine men to exorcise the evil spirits which possessed him. Only the silent walls had eyes to watch him in his terror.
Nophaie ran. He leaped the brook. From bowlder to bowlder he bounded. Along the grassy benches, under the looming ledges, over the washes, through the thickets, up the canyon he sped with that incomparable stride of the Indian runner trained under the great masters of college athletics. Strange place for the famous athlete who had delighted the crowds — who had heard their trampling, pealing roar when he ran! The white man had trained him — the white man had educated him. But it was now the Indian nature that gave Nophaie the instinct to run away from himself.
He halted at his camp long enough to lay aside the precious letter from Benow di cleash. He did not want to soil that white paper with its beautiful and appalling words of love. All his life he must keep them. And he feared them now. Again the shuddering of his flesh, the burning of the marrow of his bones. Out he ran — straight for the notch of the canyon — with wild eyes on the white- towered wall of Nothsis Ahn. No Indian had ever surmounted that wall. But Nophaie would surmount it or perish in the attempt. To see afar over the desert, to pray and to absolve himself, the Indian had always climbed high.
Nophaie’s moccasined feet padded softly over the bare stone slope. He ran up the long wavy red mound, and from its round dome, where often he had watched the eagles and the sunset, he put his keen vision to the task of finding a way to climb the north face of Nothsis Ahn. There were a hundred intricate zigzag ascents up that mountain wall, not one of which seemed possible for man.
Down the waved knoll Nophaie ran, light and sure as a wildcat, and over the wide area of bare rock to the main base of the wall.
There he began to climb in a long slant, up the brown smooth incline, veined and striped, and around the headed corners, and back to a long slant in the other direction, up and up by these zigzag courses, to the curved and rolling rim of red, where began the vast slow heave of the white amphitheater.
All this slope was wind-swept, bare, soft to the foot, a white stone that disintegrated under force; and it was like a rolling sea slanted on end. Levels, mounds, benches, ridges, holes, gorges, all rounded and smooth, with never a crack or cutting edge or loosened fragment, passed by under Nophaie’s swift steps. Impetuosity and passion drove him. He climbed on, gradually slowing to the steeper ascent. From far below this white amphitheater had appeared what it was not. Its dimensions magnified with approach. A line of cleavage seen from below was on nearer view a great wide dip in the ocean slope of rock. Nophaie’s detours consumed miles of travel. To and fro across the corrugated face of this mountain wall he traveled, always climbing higher. A rare cold atmosphere, thin in oxygen, further slowed his efforts. Climbing grew hard. He no longer ran. He sweat, he burned, he panted. He saw only the stone under his feet and the gray looming towers above, still seemingly as unattainable as ever.
Along the last circling ledge of the amphitheater he worked around to the bold rugged bluff, surmounted it, and climbed into a world of cliffs, precipices, promontories, sharp and jagged and jutting in strange contrasts to the waved and heaved ascent he had accomplished. Here he had exercise for the eye of an eagle, the leap of a mountain sheep, the sure- footedness of a goat. Far back on the other side of the towers he worked, finding them still high above him, still unscalable. On and upward he toiled, and at last reached a point where the huge white-towered abutment joined the bulk of Nothsis Ahn. Nothing of this was visible to eye below in the valley. He had ascended to the white crags that stood out and up to hide all but the dome of the mountain. Nophaie pulled himself up, he let himself down, he leaped fissures, he crept along abysmal chasms blue in depth, he rimmed the base of crags, and climbed around and between them.
Out of the zone of white pillars and turrets at last! Level with the nests of eagles! Nophaie stood at the base of the weathered slope of Nothsis Ahn, the track of the avalanches, the tilted level of loose rocks; and he looked almost straight up to the green band of timber and the glistening dome of snow. If climbing had been difficult and hazardous before, now it was approaching the impossible. Nophaie sent the rocks sliding below him; he started the slides into avalanches. He loosened the slopes above him. He performed miracles of agility, speed, and endurance. Like the Indian masters of the legends, he consorted with eagles, bounded with the feet of the wind, and swung on the edges of the clouds.
Snow and spruce halted Nophaie, a forest of evergreens, matted and webbed into impenetrable windfalls, buried deep in the white ice of the heights. He could not go higher. At the edge of the snow line, on a gray brow of rock, he built a monument, so that it would be visible to eye of Indian from below. But he offered no prayer to the god of the mountain.
In the piercing cold of that altitude, blown upon by the strong northwind, Nophaie gazed out and down upon the naked earth below. Dim, abysmal, obscure the depths from which he had toiled! Beauty and color were naught. Distance was lost. The great canyons were dark purple threads. Over all the immensity of ghastly desert brooded a spirit of desolation and death and decay. The sun blazed down a terrible truthfulness of light.
What Nophaie had climbed so desperately for seemed never to have been. He had spent the forces of his nature — the physical instincts. For that hour, perhaps forever, he had conquered. On the heights came a regurgitation of emotion, a flashing back of thought. There was blood on the worn edges of his moccasins; his finger nails were worn to the quick. The ache in his bones, the pang in his lungs, the deadness of his muscles attested to the nature of that climb. Hours could be measured as years!
Long after dark that night Nophaie dragged his bruised and weary body into camp, there to crawl into his bed and stretch his limbs, as if never to move them again. Sleep and rest, for days and nights, restored his strength, yet he knew that climb had been the supreme physical effort of his life. The strain of a hard football game had been as nothing. A hundred-mile run across the desert had been
as nothing. Likewise Nophaie realized that he could never again climb the north wall of Nothsis Ahn. Powerful, fleet, sure, agile, enduring, keen- sighted and Indian-sinewed as he was, these faculties did not alone account for that superhuman task. The very inspiration for the climb had receded somehow, dimmed and paled back into the secret and mystic springs of his nature. But as the days and nights multiplied in the shadow of the silent walls Nophaie learned that the noble proof of his love for Marian was not in surrender to it. He would not drag her down to his level. Utterly impossible for him was a life among white men. He had been wronged, robbed, deprived of his inheritance. He saw the incredible brutality and ruthlessness of white men toward his race. He saw that race vanishing. He was the Vanishing American. He had no God, no religion, no hope. That strange hope born there in the canyon had been burned out in the fire kindled by Marian’s offer of love. Nature had fostered that hope. It had deluded him. It had been a veiled beautiful face lifted to him.
The silent walls heard Nophaie’s denial — and how strange a light gleamed on their faces! Benow di cleash loved him and he must break her heart. But grief would give her strength that his burden could never give. Nature in her inscrutable way had drawn Nophaie and the white girl together; and no doubt that merciless Nature divined a union which would further her evolutional designs. Nature recognized no religion, no God. Nature desired only birth, reproduction, death, in every living creature. Love was the blind and imperious tool of Nature. How could that love endure with age and death?
Days passed into weeks and weeks into months. Three times the Pahute came, and three times a white, thick letter stormed Nophaie’s soul — yet left him stronger.
He measured the passing of winter by the roar of wind on the slope of Nothsis Ahn, by the circling back of the sun, by the earlier dawns, by the hot days and the peeping of frogs at nightfall. He lived that swiftly flying time in his simple camp tasks, in wandering and climbing as if the unattainable would one day be his, in dreaming of Marian and writing thoughts and experiences for her, in study of the nature of his stone-walled retreat.