by Zane Grey
Plunging on the actor, then, Wesley beat down his guard, banged him with right and left. A sharp uppercut to the nose upset Pelham, who sat down absurdly. Scarlet poured from his mashed nose. Whipped, tragic, he bounded up gamely, only to meet the same rain of swift blows. Back he staggered. Then Wesley swung with all he had left—and turned abruptly away.
Betty came running to him as he untied his scarf. “Oh, Wes! Wes! Are you hurt?”
“Wipe me off . . . Betty . . . I cain’t see,” panted Wesley.
Lee joined them, his hawk-eyes matching the fight in his convulsed face. “Aw, pard! Every time he hit you, he hit me!”
“Yeah? I’ll bet you don’t feel what I feel. How’s the handsome star?”
“Senseless yet. Mebbe daid. But he shore took it. Wes, we gotta hand bouquets to these motion picture folks. I heahed Van Dever say . . . ‘Served him just right, the big stiff. Always throwing a monkey wrench into the works. But this picture with me in that stampede . . . riding to that fall . . . oh, what a climax! And oh, you cowboy, you can have me!’ ”
“Wal, I’ll be doggoned!” ejaculated Wesley.
“Lee, she can’t have that cowboy,” interposed Betty with flashing eyes.
Hinckley waved to the cowboys and Indians, driving the tired mustangs back up the slope. Then he bellowed through his megaphone: “All in the little black box! Let’s call it a day and a picture. Scram!”
Death Valley
Of the five hundred and fifty-seven thousand square miles of desert land in the Southwest, Death Valley is the lowest below sea level, the most arid and desolate. It derives its felicitous name from the earliest days of the gold strike in California, when a caravan of Mormons, numbering about seventy, struck out from Salt Lake, to cross the Mojave Desert and make a short cut to the gold fields. All but two of these prospectors perished in the deep, iron-walled, ghastly sinkholes, which from that time became known as Death Valley.
The survivors of this fatal expedition brought news to the world that the somber Valley of Death was a treasure mine of minerals, and since then hundreds of prospectors and wanderers have lost their lives there. To seek gold and to live in the lonely waste places of the earth have been and ever will be driving passions of men.
My companion on this trip was a Norwegian named Nielsen. On most of my trips to lonely and wild places I have been fortunate as to comrades or guides. The circumstances of my meeting Nielsen were so singular that I think they will serve as an interesting introduction. Some years ago I received a letter, brief, clear, and well-written, in which the writer stated that he had been a wanderer over the world, a sailor before the mast, and was now a prospector for gold. He had taken four trips alone down into the desert of Sonora, and in many other places of the Southwest, and knew the prospecting game. Somewhere he had run across my story DESERT GOLD in which I told about a lost gold mine. And the point of his letter was that, if I could give him some idea as to where the lost mine was located, he would go find it and give me half. His name was Sievert Nielsen. I wrote him that to my regret the lost gold mine existed only in my imagination, but, if he would come to Avalon to see me, perhaps we might both profit by such a meeting. To my surprise, he came. He was a man of about thirty-five, of magnificent physique, weighing about one hundred and ninety, and he was so enormously broad across the shoulders that he did not look his five feet ten. He had a wonderful head, huge, round, solid, like a cannonball. And his bronzed face, his regular features, square, firm jaw, and clear gray eyes, fearless and direct, were singularly attractive to me. Well-educated, with a strange calm poise and a cool courtesy, not common in Americans, he evidently was a man of good family, by his own choice a rolling stone and adventurer.
Nielsen accompanied me on two trips into the wilderness of Arizona, on one of which he saved my life, and on the other he rescued all our party from a most uncomfortable and possibly hazardous situation—but these are tales I may tell elsewhere. In January 1919, Nielsen and I traveled around the desert of southern California from Palm Springs to Picacho, and in March we went to Death Valley.
Nowadays a little railroad, the Tonapah and Tidewater Railroad, runs northward, from the Santa Fé over the barren Mojave, and it passes within fifty miles of Death Valley.
It was sunset when we arrived at Death Valley Junction—a weird, strange sunset in drooping curtains of transparent cloud lighting up dark mountain ranges, some peaks of which were clear-cut and black against the sky, and others veiled in trailing storms, and still others white with snow. That night in the dingy little store I heard prospectors talk about float, which meant gold on the surface, and about high grade ores, zinc, copper, silver, lead, manganese, and about how borax was mined thirty years ago, and hauled out of Death Valley by teams of twenty mules. Next morning, while Nielsen packed the outfit, I visited the borax mill. It was the property of an English firm, and the work of hauling, grinding, roasting borax ore went on day and night. Inside, it was as dusty and full of powdery atmosphere as an old-fashioned flour mill. The ore was hauled by train from some twenty miles over toward the valley, and was dumped from a high trestle into shutes that fed the grinders. For an hour I watched this constant stream of borax as it slid down into the hungry crushers, and I listened to the chalk-faced operator who yelled in my ear. Once he picked a piece of gypsum out of the borax. He said the mill was getting out twenty-five hundred sacks a day. The most significant thing he said was that men did not last long at such labor, and in the mines six months appeared to be the limit of human endurance. How soon I had enough of that choking air in the room where the borax was ground! And the place where the borax was roasted in huge round revolving furnaces—I found that intolerable. When I got out into the cool clean desert air, I felt an immeasurable relief. And that relief made me thoughtful of the lives of men who labored, who were chained by necessity, by duty or habit, or by love, to the hard tasks of the world. It did not seem fair. These laborers of the borax mines and mills, like the stokers of ships, and coal-diggers, and blast-furnace hands—like thousands and millions of men, killed themselves outright or impaired their strength, and, when they were gone or rendered useless, others were found to take their places. Whenever I come in contact with some phase of this problem of life, I take the meaning or the lesson of it to myself. And as the years go by my respect and reverence and wonder increase for these men of elemental lives, these horny-handed toilers with physical things, these uncomplaining users of brawn and bone, these giants who breast the elements, who till the earth and handle iron, who fight the natural forces with their bodies.
That day about noon I looked back down the long gravel and greasewood slope that we had ascended, and I saw the borax mill now only a smoky blot on the desert floor. When we reached the pass between the Black Mountains and the Funeral Mountains, we left the road, and were soon lost to the works of man. How strange a gladness, a relief! Something dropped away from me. I felt the same subtle change in Nielsen. For one thing, he stopped talking, except an occasional word to the mules.
The blunt end of the Funeral Range was as remarkable as its name. It sheered up very high, a saw-toothed range with colored strata tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees. Zigzag veins of black and red and yellow, rather dull, ran through the great drab-gray mass. This end of the range, an iron mountain, frowned down upon us with hard and formidable aspect. The peak was draped in streaky veils of rain from low-dropping clouds that appeared to have lodged there. All below lay clear and cold in the sunlight.
Our direction lay to the westward, and at that altitude, about three thousand feet, how pleasant to face the sun! For the wind was cold. The narrow shallow wash leading down from the pass deepened, widened, almost imperceptibly at first, and then gradually until its proportions were striking. It was a gully where the gravel washed down dining rains, and where a scant vegetation, greasewood, and few low cacti and scrubby sage struggled for existence. Not a bird or lizard or living creature in sight! The trail was getting lonely. From time
to time I looked back, because as we could not see far ahead all the superb scene spread and towered behind us. By and by our wash grew to be a wide cañon, winding away from under the massive, impondering wall of the Funeral Range. The high side of this magnificent and impressive line of mountains faced west—a succession of unscalable slopes of bare ragged rock, jagged and jutted, dark drab, rusty iron, with gray and oblique strata running through them far as eye could see. Clouds soared around the peaks. Shadows sailed along the slopes.
Walking in loose gravel was as hard as trudging along in sand. After about fifteen miles I began to have leaden feet. I did not mind hard work, but I wanted to avoid over-exertion. When I am extremely wearied, my feelings are liable to be colored somewhat by depression or melancholy. Then it always bothered me to get tired while Nielsen kept on with his wonderful stride.
“Say, Nielsen, do you take me for a Yaqui?” I complained. “Slow up a little.”
Then he obliged me, and to cheer me up he told me about a little tramping experience he had in Baja, California. Somewhere on the east slope of Sierra Madre his burros strayed or were killed by mountain lions, and he found it imperative to strike at once for the nearest ranch below the border, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles. He could carry only so much of his outfit, and, as some of it was valuable to him he discarded all his food except a few biscuits, and a canteen of water. Resting only a few hours, without sleep at all, he walked the hundred and fifty miles in three days and nights. I believed that Nielsen, by telling me such incidents of his own wild experience, inspired me to more endurance than I knew I possessed.
As we traveled on down the cañon, its dimensions continued to grow. It finally turned to the left, and opened out wide into a valley running west. A low range of hills faced us, rising in a long sweeping slant of earth, like the incline of a glacier, to rounded spurs. Halfway up this slope, where the brown earth lightened, there showed an outcropping of clay—amber and cream and cinnamon and green, all exquisitely vivid and clear. This bright spot appeared to be isolated. Far above it rose other clay slopes of variegated hues, red and russet and mauve and gray, and colors indescribably merged, all running in veins through this range of hills. We faced the west again and, descending this valley, were soon greeted by a region of clay hills, bare, cone-shaped, fantastic in shade, slope, and ridge, with a high sharp peak dominating all. The colors were mauve, taupe, pearl-gray, all stained by a descending band of crimson, as if a higher slope had been stabbed to let its life blood flow down. The softness, the richness, and beauty of this texture of earth amazed and delighted my eyes.
Quite unprepared, at time approaching sunset, we reached and rounded a sharp curve, to see down and far away, and to be held mute in our tracks. Between a white-mantled mountain range on the left and the dark-striped lofty range on the right I could see far down into a gulf, a hazy void, a vast stark valley that seemed streaked and ridged and cañoned, an abyss into which veils of rain were dropping and over which broken clouds hung, pierced by red and gold rays.
Death Valley! Far down and far away still, yet confounding at first sight! I gazed spellbound. It oppressed my heart. Nielsen stood like a statue, silent, absorbed for a moment, then he strode on. I followed, and every second saw more and different aspects, that could not, however, change the first stunning impression. Immense, unreal, weird! I went on down the widening cañon, looking into that changing void. How full of color! It smoked. The traceries of streams or shining white washes brightened the floor of the long dark pit. Patches and plains of white, borax flats or alkali, showed up, like snow. A red haze, sinister and somber, hung over the eastern ramparts of this valley, and over the western drooped gray veils of rain, like thinnest lacy clouds, through which gleams of the sun shone.
Nielsen plodded on, mindful of our mules. But I lingered, and at last checked my reluctant steps at an open high point with commanding and magnificent view. As I did not attempt the impossible—to write down thoughts and sensations—afterward I could remember only a few. How desolate and grand! The faraway, lonely, and terrible places of the earth are the most beautiful and elevating. Life’s little day seemed so easy to understand, so pitiful. As the sun began to set and the storm clouds moved across it, this wondrous scene darkened, changed every moment, brightened, grew full of luminous red light and then streaked by golden gleams. The tips of the Panamint Mountains came out silver above the purple clouds. At sunset the moment was glorious—dark, forbidding, dim, weird, dismal, yet still tinged with gold. Not like any other scene! Dante’s Inferno! Valley of Shadows! cañon of Purple Veils!
When the sun had set and all that upheaved and furrowed world of rock had received a mantle of gray, and a slumberous, sulphurous, ruddy haze slowly darkened to purple and black, then I realized more fully that I was looking down into Death Valley.
Twilight was stealing down when I caught up with Nielsen. He had selected for our camp a protected nook near where the cañon floor bore some patches of sage, the stalks and roots of which would serve for firewood. We unpacked, fed the mules some grain, pitched our little tent, and made our bed all in short order. During the meal we talked a little, but afterward, when the chores were done and the mules had become quiet and the strange thick silence had settled down upon us, we did not talk at all.
The night was black, with sky mostly obscured by clouds. A pale haze marked the west where the afterglow had faded; in the south one radiant star crowned a mountain peak. I strolled away in the darkness and sat down upon a stone. How intense the silence! Dead, vast, sepulcher-like, dreaming, waiting, a silence of ages, burdened with the history of the past, awful! I strained my ears for sound of insect or rustle of sage or drop of weathered rock. The soft, cool desert wind was soundless. This silence had something terrifying in it, making me a man alone on the earth. The great spaces, the wild places as they had been millions of years before! I seemed to divine how through them man might develop from savage to a god, and how alas! he might go back again.
When I returned to camp, Nielsen had gone to bed and the fire had burned low. I threw on some branches of sage. The fire blazed up. But it seemed different from other campfires. No cheer, no glow, no sparkle. Perhaps it was owing to scant and poor wood. Still I thought it was owing as much to the place. The sadness, the loneliness, the desolateness of this place weighed upon the campfire the same as it did upon my heart.
We got up at five-thirty. At dawn the sky was a cold leaden gray, with a dull gold and rose in the east. A hard wind, eager and nipping, blew up the cañon. At six o’clock the sky brightened somewhat, and the day did not promise so threatening.
An hour later we broke camp. Traveling in the early morning was pleasant, and we made good time down the winding cañon, arriving at Furnace Creek about noon, where we halted to rest. This stream of warm water flowed down from a gully that headed up in the Funeral Mountains. It had a disagreeable taste, somewhat acrid and soapy. A green thicket of brush was, indeed, welcome to the eye. It consisted of a rank, coarse kind of grass, and arrowweed, mesquite, and tamarack. The last-named bore a pink, fuzzy blossom, not unlike pussy willow, which was quite fragrant. Here the deadness of the region seemed further enlivened by several small birds, speckled and gray, two ravens, and a hawk. They all appeared to be hunting food. On a ridge above Furnace Creek, we came upon a spring of poison water. It was clear, sparkling, with a greenish cast, and it deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime, go hand in hand down the naked shingle of this desolate desert.
While tramping around in the neighborhood of Furnace Creek, I happened upon an old, almost obliterated trail. It led toward the ridges of clay, and, when I had climbed it a little way, I began to get an impression that the slopes on the other side must run down into a basin or cañon. So I climbed to the top.
The magnificent scenes of desert and mountain, like the splendid things of life, must be climbed for. In this instance I was suddenly and stunningly confronted by a yellow gulf of cone-shaped and fan-shaped ridges, all bare, crinkly clay, of gold, of amber, of pink, of bronze, of cream, all tapering down to round-knobbed lower ridges, bleak and barren, yet wonderfully beautiful in their stark purity of denudation; until at last far down between two widely separated hills shone, dim and blue and ghastly with shining white streaks like silver streams—the Valley of Death. Then beyond it climbed the league-long red slope, merging into the iron-buttressed base of the Panamint Range, and here line on line, and bulge on bulge, rose the bold benches, and on up the unscalable outcroppings of rock, like colossal ribs of the earth, on and up the steep slopes to where their density of blue-black color began to thin out with streaks of white, and thence upward to the last noble height, where the cold pure snow gleamed against the sky.
I descended into this yellow maze, this world of gullies and ridges where I found it difficult to keep from getting lost. I did lose my bearings, but, as my boots made deep imprints in the soft clay, I knew it would be easy to back track my trail. After a while this labyrinthine series of channels and dunes opened into a wide space enclosed on three sides by denuded slopes, mostly yellow. These slopes were smooth, graceful, symmetrical, with tiny tracery of erosion, and each appeared to retain its own color, yellow or cinnamon or mauve. But they were always dominated by a higher one of a different color. And this mystic region sloped and slanted to a great amphitheater that was walled on the opposite side by a mountain of bare earth of every hue, and of a thousand ribbed and scalloped surfaces. At its base the golds and russets and yellows were strongest, but ascending its slopes were changing colors—a dark beautiful mouse color on one side and a strange pearly cream on the other. Between these great corners of the curve climbed ridges of gray and heliotrope and amber, to meet wonderful veins of green—green as the sea in sunlight—and tracery of white—and on the bold face of this amphitheater, high up, stood out a zigzag belt of dull red, the stain of which had run down to tinge the other hues. Above all this wondrous coloration upheaved the bare breast of the mountain, growing darker with earthy browns, up to the gray old rock ramparts.