‘a’ backed out ’f he’d had to travel through here.  Think Mr. Coronado ’s all right in his top hamper, Capm?  Do, hey?  Wal, then I’m all wrong; guess I’m ’s crazy’s a bedbug.  Wouldn’t ‘a’ketched me steerin’ this course of my own free will ‘n’ foreknowledge.  Jest look at the land now.  Don’t it look like the bottomless pit blowed up ‘n’ gone to smash?  Tell ye, ’f the Old Boy himself sh’d ride up alongside, shouldn’t be a mite s’prised to see him.  Sh’d reckon he had a much bigger right to be s’prised to ketch me here.”

After some further riding, shaking his sandy head, staring about him and whistling, he broke out again.

“Tell ye, Capm, this beats my imagination.  Used to think I c’d yarn it pooty consid’able.  But never can tell this.  Never can do no manner ’f jestice to it.  Look a there now.  There’s a nateral bridge, or ’n unnateral one.  There’s a hole blowed through a forty foot rock ’s clean ’s though ’twas done with Satan’s own field-piece, sech ‘s Milton tells about.  An’ there’s a steeple higher ‘n our big one in Fair Haven.  An’ there’s a church, ‘n’ a haystack.  If the devil hain’t done his biggest celebratin’ ‘n’ carpenterin’ ‘n’ farmin’ round here, d’no ’s I know where he has done it.  Beats me, Capm; cleans me out.  Can’t do no jestice to it.  Can’t talk about it.  Seems to me ’s though I was a fool.”

Yes, even Phineas Glover’s small and sinewy soul (a psyche of the size, muscular force, and agility of a flea) had been seized, oppressed, and in a manner smashed by the hideous sublimity of this wilderness of sandstone, basalt, and granite.

Two hours passed, during which, from the nature of the ground, the travellers could neither see nor be seen by their pursuers.  Then came a breathless ascent up another of the monstrous sandstone terraces.  Thurstane ordered every man to dismount, so as to spare the beasts as much as possible.  He walked by the side of Clara, patting, coaxing, and cheering her suffering horse, and occasionally giving a heave of his solid shoulder against the trembling haunches.

“Let me walk,” the girl presently said.  “I can’t bear to see the poor beast so worried.”

“It would be better, if you can do it,” he replied, remembering that she might soon have to call upon the animal for speed.

She dismounted, clasped her hands over his arm, and clambered thus.  From time to time, when some rocky step was to be surmounted, he lifted her bodily up it.

“How can you be so strong?” she said, looking at him wonderingly and gratefully.

“Miss Van Diemen, you give me strength,” he could not help responding.

At last they were at the summit of the rugged slope.  The animals were trembling and covered with sweat; some of them uttered piteous whinnyings, or rather bleatings, like distressed sheep; five or six lay down with hollow moans and rumblings.  It was absolutely necessary to take a short rest.