The Vanishing American

by Zane Grey

  CHAPTER XV

  Deep in the canyoned recesses of the rock- ribbed earth, far beneath the white dome of Nothsis Ahn, Nophaie established his refuge in one of the almost inaccessible niches of his Canyon of Silent Walls.

  He had packed supplies in from Kaidab and had left the post with an arrangement whereby any letters from Marian and more supplies would be sent once a month by a trusted Pahute.

  Nophaie held dear to heart and conscience Marian’s appeal that he would not become a murderer. And it seemed the only way he could escape spilling blood was to hide himself in the canyons, there to spend the winter months, and to wait. He had little fear of Blucher’s hired policemen finding him here. Long before they could get near the only entrance to the Canyon of Silent Walls they would have lost any possible trace of him. Between his retreat and the upland plateau of Nothsis Ahn lay many miles of labyrinthine canyons, and the great western roll of the Marching Rocks. There was no trail over these hills of marble. The smooth wind-worn slopes left no trace of hoofs or moccasins. Many were the perilous precipices along which wound the only course over this range of wind-carved mounds. The last Pahute hogan stood on the cedared brow of the upland slope, thirty miles away in an air line, three days of exceedingly toilsome travel up and ever upward out of the rocky depths.

  Nophaie penetrated to the furthermost corner of one of the canyoned wings of the valley; and here where the foot of white man had never trodden, under gleaming white walls lifting to the sky, he pitched his camp. It was a place of all places for the lonely Indian. The upland country was now in the grip of winter. Down here the grass and moss were still green, the willow and oak leaves had thinned out, yet many were left, fluttering gold in the sunlight, and the cottonwoods tenaciously clung to their autumn hues. Flowers still bloomed on the benches where the sun lingered longest. Bees and beetles buzzed throughout the noonday hours. Choe, the spruce tree, beloved by Nophaie, could be seen standing black and slender far up on the snow-margined brow of Nothsis Ahn, but down here in the valley gahd, the cedar, flourished and kept its everlasting rich green. Tolie, the blue jay, sacred to Nopah ceremonies, had come down off the mountain to spend the winter where the heat of the sun was reflected from lofty walls. Mocking-birds heralded the late sunrise with bursts of melody. Shy wild little birds, nameless for Nophaie, darted among the willows above the murmuring stream, now and then uttering melancholy notes. And from the high niches and crannies pealed down the sweet, strange piercing twitter of the canyon swift, bird that pitched downward like the gleam of an arrow.

  Nophaie had reasoned that if there was anything to help him now in his extremity it was communion with his soul, and mastery of his physical self, here in the shadow of these lonely, silent walls. If arrest for assault threatened him out there on the reservation he could not long have gone on working among his people. Besides, more than arrest surely threatened him. The wound from Noki’s treacherous bullet had scarcely healed. So that there were several reasons why it was well for him to hide, to be alone, to await some mystic issue which was written. He would escape his enemies; he would be free of the cold winter that bound all Indians to their hogans; he could live in utter freedom here in this beautiful valley; he could dream and think the hours away, facing his soul, finding himself, growing away from that fierce hatred, realizing some melancholy happiness in the sweetness of love for Benow di cleash.

  Nophaie’s valley resembled somewhat the shape of an octopus, except that the main body was narrow and crooked and the arms extended far and winding. This body was about a mile in length, and the larger arms were much longer. Innumerable ramifications on a lesser scale cut into the cliff walls everywhere. A thousand undiscovered and untrodden nooks and corners, caves and caverns, cliff-dwellings and canyons in miniature assuredly were lost in the intricacies of this valley. The great carved arm that cut deep into the bulk of Nothsis Ahn was a tremendous canyon in itself, lofty-walled at its head, opening wide at its juncture with the main body, margined by wondrous shining smooth walls waved like billows, red and yellow in hue, and crossing the valley proper to narrow again and lift its ramparts to the sky. Through this canyon ran the stream of water, and its course was one of ruggedness. That stream in flood, swollen by suddenly melting snows on the mountain, had cut a deep and devious gorge and had carried a million bowlders on its way. It had dug a dry river bed of rocks. Gravel-bars, sand-bars hid their white surfaces amid the bowlders, and cottonwood trees stood up among them, and willows shaded them. Thickets of reeds and matted brush and long coarse-bladed grass made impenetrable barriers to the wilder recesses. This canyon showed most the forces of the elements and it was a wilderness.

  Nophaie seemed driven to explore, to seek, to search, to climb– especially to climb for a height that was unattainable but to which he must aspire. All Indians loved lofty places. And Nophaie was like an eagle in his love of the lonely crag and the wide outlook. The silent walls close at hand had no greater fascination than those beyond ascent. Time would surely come when they would speak to him. These dreaming walls had a voice for others beside the red man–for all humanity. But it had to be waited for and earned. Nature was jealous of her secrets. She spoke only to those who loved her.

  Rest and calm returned to Nophaie, and then the days seemed to merge into one another, to glide on and on toward a nameless and wished-for end, an unveiling of the future.

  The day had been unusually warm for that time of year. At sunset, when Nophaie climbed the high cone-shaped knoll in the amphitheater of the valley, there was still heat on the smooth rock. He felt it through his moccasins, and when in climbing he touched it with his bare hand the contact was pleasant. A partially overcast sky and an absence of wind had kept out the cool air from off the mountain.

  Nophaie reached the round summit and there he reclined. Bees or beetles went humming past him, evidently toward the higher cedared part of the valley. These belated toilers made the best of daylight.

  The overcast sky broke but slightly in the west, and that only enough to send a faint rose color to the tips of the great white towers. Through the gap to the north Nophaie saw the dim purple rim of a distant mesa. The long slow twilight was one of the strange and beautiful features of this Canyon of Silent Walls. Sunset came early because the insulating walls stood up so loftily that before the day was done they hid the westering sun. So the waning light lingered. Nophaie watched the faint rose fade and the gray shadows rise. What he longed for eluded him. He had only the strange joy of his sensorial perceptions.

  Before darkness enveloped the valley he descended from the knoll, walking on a long slant, sure- footed as a sheep, sliding here and there, down and down into the bowlder- strewn ravine, where indeed night had fallen. There beside the stream he was halted by sounds he had not heard before–the strange croaking of canyon frogs. The unusually warm day had brought summer again to the denizens of the canyon. But the croaking of these frogs was weird and weak, as if they had only half awakened. One uttered a faint hoarse rattle, another a concatenated twang, another a kind of bellow, at widely separated intervals. Then followed a few trills, neither high nor sweet, yet somehow melodious. With the cool night wind these songs of belated summer ceased, and Nophaie heard them no more.

  But that little he had heard was good for him. While he sat there on a huge bowlder the night fell black. He felt the sadness and tranquillity of the hour, and realized that many such hours must be his, out of which might come some alleviation of his sorrow.

  Above him the rounded wavy lines of the knolls loomed dark, and beyond them towered the canyon walls with crags against the sky. No blaze of stars illumined the heavens. There was no blue. From the shadow under him there rose a sweet music–tinkle and babble and murmur, and splashing and gurgling of swift water over stones. It accentuated the loneliness and silence of this isolated rent in the earth. Nophaie’s people, and the world of white men, seemed far away and not necessary for him at that hour. Time spent here would teach Nophaie the superfluity of
many things–perhaps resignation to his infidelity and the futility of love. The silent walls, so like great eyelids full of dreams, the deep shadows, the haunting memory of the trilling frogs, the soft cool breeze, bringing breath of snow, the vast black heave of the mountain rock, and the infinite sky above, more mystic without its trains of stars–these brought a sense of the littleness of all living things, of the exceeding brevity of life.

  Nophaie’s emotions gradually grew deep and full. That bitter and hateful mood of the past slowly lost its hold on him. He seemed to be stripping off the clutch of a half- dead lichen from his soul. The oppression of the wonderful overhanging rocks–a sense surely that had not been Indian–left him wholly. Noble thoughts began to form in Nophaie’s mind. His work left undone, his duty to his people, his responsibility to a white woman who had blessed him with love, must be taken up again as the only rewards of his life. Emotion uplifted Nophaie and intelligence combated selfishness. Yet always sadness dominated–an ineradicable sadness now because there had come to him a tremendous realization of the mastery and tragedy of nature. Any human nature was a fascinating study; his own in contact and relation to his people was a sorrowful thing; here against the loneliness and solitude of this wilderness it was forced out stark and naked. He seemed an animal with a soul–the necessity to eat and no longing for life–the power to recreate and no right to love–the seed of immortality in him and no belief in God.

  But strangely, a hope seemed gestating in Nophaie’s soul, trying to be born. More and more he felt its stirrings deep within him. It was like that fleeting conception of aboriginal man he sometimes caught when he narrowed his eyelids and looked at nature as if he were the first human to evolve. It was as ephemeral as the moment in which he felt but did not think. It had to do altogether with the physical. In nature then was not only the secret, but also salvation for him, if any were possible. What he yearned to reach was the God of his forefathers. This surely was a worship of nature, but not as he saw nature. The spirit of dead men did not go into rocks and trees and clouds. Was there a spirit that went anywhere? Nophaie saw through superstition. In Indians it was ignorance–the need of worship of supernatural things–of powers greater than human. But if there were a spirit in man that left his dead body might there not be a spirit in nature infinite and everlasting? Nophaie’s stirring hope was that he had really begun to hear the voices of the silent walls. Not morbid fancy, but sentiment, not lonely, brooding, erotic love, not the fear of death and the blind strengthening of false faiths, not anything but intelligent grasp at the soul of nature! Scientists would not grant nature a soul. But wise as scientists were they could not solve the riddle of life, the extent of the universe, the origin of time, the birth of man, the miracle of reproduction. Their deductions were biological, archæological, physiological, psychological, metaphysical. Nophaie was at war with the intellectual forces that had robbed him of his religion. There was something in these dreaming, silent walls, these waiting, brooding, blank walls, these wind and water sculptored stone faces of the ages. So he wondered under their shadow, he watched them at dawn, in the solemn noonday light, at sunset, and under the black canopy of night. So he climbed over them and to their summits, and high upon one to see another.

  Nophaie was sitting up high in the center of the amphitheater and the hour of sunset was nigh. An intense hue of gold crowned all the rounded rims and domes that faced the west, out of which poured a glory of sunset light. High on the white towers of rock the gold was red; higher still on the snow of Nothsis Ahn it was rose. Away across the gap of the valley, northward, loomed up the great mesa, veiled in lilac haze. Faint, soft, dying lights attended the waving slopes under the ragged crags that touched the colored sunset sky. Clouds floated there–fleecy, like wisps of coral in a turquoise sea–cumulus, creamy white, edged by silver, mushrooming in rosy columns–clouds of pearl and alabaster, and higher in the intense blue, smoky wreaths of delicate mauve, and bossy beaten masses of burnished bronze.

  Every moment then had its transfiguration. Every moment seemed endless in its gift to the recording soul. This was the living world of nature and its change was one of the elements of its marvelous vitality. The beauty and the glory might have existed only in Nophaie’s mind. But they were tangible things. The light fell golden upon his hand. All the valley was full of luminous glow, moving, changing, rays and shadows, a medium of enchantment. An eagle, bow- winged and black against the luminosity of the sky, swept across the field of Nophaie’s vision, flashing like a streak of darkened light, to plunge into the purple depths beyond the walls. It gave life to Nophaie’s panorama. It gave him a strange joy. From the lofty tower above the monarch of the heights had shot downward like a thunderbolt, free, alone, beautiful, wild as the wild wind, to gladden Nophaie’s sight, to add another thrill to his hope.

  Nophaie knew not the prayer to say there upon his rounded altar of rock. Not one Nopah of all the tribe would have been so wanting! But he breathed one of his own.

  “Glory of sun at dying day, Beauty of cloud in the sky, Splendor of light on the crag, Passionless god of nature Make me as thou. Lend me thy gift. Teach me thy secret. Give me thy spirit. “Eagle of the marvelous flight, Shade of the purple height, Ray and veil and mystic glow, Blue of heaven and rose of snow, Come to Nophaie. “Come all things of heaven and earth, Come out of west and north and east, Come from the blowing wind. Come from without the silent walls, To the lost and lonely soul And call me thine.” Nophaie turned to face the east–the sacred direction of the sun- worshiper. Grandeur of the west must be reflected in the east. Rounded rocks, waved on high, billowing higher to the rims, in velvet tones of crimson and lavender, heaved to the loftier walls. Where the setting sun struck the wall- faces in full light it painted them a vivid orange red. Deep shadows made sharp contrast. Crevices and lines of cleavage hid their purple mystery from the blaze of the sun. They lifted the golden surfaces, contoured them with edge of violet. The Canyon of Silent Walls had been flooded with transforming hues. It shone upon a thousand surfaces of gold and red, with undertones of steps, leading up and up, stairway of the gods, to the castellated towers above. Gray towers, white towers, tinged with gold, rugged and spired, crowned this horizon wall of rock and led Nophaie’s gaze onward to the south where the grand north wall of Nothsis Ahn was emblazoned with the cataclysmic scars of ages.

  Of all the silent walls insulating Nophaie’s valley, that was the loftiest and the most aloof, the one most calling, the wall of weathered slope of avalanche, of the green-black timber belt shining in the sun, of the pure white dome of snow. Here were the unattainable heights. Baffled and haunted, Nophaie could only withdraw his gaze down and down to the canyoned amphitheater beneath him and reconstruct in imagination this magnificent speaking wall of rock, this barrier of stone, this monument of nature, this beautiful face of the mountain of light.

  Beneath Nophaie there was shade of canyon depths–the dark cedar clumps, the blank gray thickets, the pale bowlders, all growing obscure and mysterious in the purple twilight. Where the base of the lower wall began to sheer upward it was dark, carrying on its face the conformation of the western walls that cast the shadow. Darkly the wavering edge of shade stood out with startling distinctness against the deep red sunset–mirrored cliffs beyond. Perceptibly this dark line of shade crept on high. As the sun sank lower the shadows of all intervening walls rose like a tide, and the radiance moved upward. There was no standing still of these contrasting bands of light and darkness. They moved and their color changed. A canyon swift swept glitteringly down from the heights, like a flying spark of golden fire, and darted into the shadows, perhaps to the warmer shelves of rock for the night. Sweet, wild, and faint twittered out their notes.

  The red walls sheered up to those of gold, where line and regularity broke into a thousand cliffs, corners, benches, caves, a vast half- circular mountain front of rock where niches were fringed by stunted cedars and arches festooned by clinging lichens. An army of cliff-dwellers might
once have dwelt on that great slope. A mile wide and nearly as high was this one wall of belted gold, rugged, jutted, jagged, buttressed, terraced, and crowned by cornice of white crags. Only winged creatures could ever rest on those towering pinnacles. They belonged to the condors and the clouds–towers like idols of the gods, golden at the base, white as clay above, with ruddy crowns pointing to the broad black belt of Nothsis Ahn, and the rose-white dome of snow.

  Wall columnar as the rolling lofty cloud of the sky! Nophaie gazed upward, lost in contemplation. Of all gifts the gift of sight was best. But the eye of mind saw into the infinite. And while he gazed the sun went on with its miracle of transfiguration. Life of color–spirit of glory–symbol of eternal change! This enchantment of a moment was the smile of nature.

  Nophaie pictured the wondrous scene from above; he imagined he had the eye of the soaring eagle. Underneath that strong vision lay the dark canyons, the red knolls, the golden walls, a broken world of waved bare stone. High on one of the rounded hills of rock stood a lonely, statuesque figure of man–the Indian–Nophaie–strange, pitifully little, a quivering atom among the colossal monuments of inanimate nature. He was the mystery of life thrown against that stark background of the age-old earth. Like a shipwrecked mariner on his spar- strewn sinking deck the Indian gazed up at the solid and enduring mountain. Bright stone-face of light! Silent wall with a thousand walls!

  All Nophaie’s profound worship of the elements, his mastery of will and stern projection of soul, his sublimity of hope, the intense cry of his spirit for light–more light–light of God like this glorious light of sun–left him standing there on the height, alone in the solitude, with burden unlifted, with the passionless, pitiless, ruthless, all-pervading and all-concealing eyes of nature on him in his abasement.

  Days passed into weeks and time was naught. The north wind roared on Nothsis Ahn and storm clouds lodged there, black, with dropping gray veils. But down in the Canyon of Silent Walls there was neither winter cold nor wind. Nophaie sought the sunny walls and dreamed in their reflected heat. Only one arm of the canyon still remained unexplored, and he had left that for some task of energy and action to fall back upon when his spirit ebbed low.