We must hasten over the minor events of this remarkable journey.  The travellers, towing the bearskin boat behind the Buchanan, passed the mouth of Canon Bonito, and soon afterward beheld the San Juan swallowed up in the Grand River, a far larger stream which rises in the Rocky Mountains east of Utah.  They swept by the horrible country of the Utes and Payoches, without holding intercourse with its squalid and savage inhabitants.  Here and there, at the foot of some monstrous precipice, in a profound recess surrounded by a frenzy of rocks, they saw hamlets of a few miserable wigwams, with patches of starveling corn and beans.  Sharp wild cries, like the calls of malicious brownies, or the shrieks of condemned spirits, were sent after them, without obtaining response.

“They bees only naygurs,” observed Sweeny.  “Niver moind their blaggard ways.”

After the confluence with the Grand River came solitude.  The land had been swept and garnished:  swept by the waters and garnished with horrors; a land of canons, plateaux, and ranges, all arid; a land of desolation and the shadow of death.  There was nothing on which man or beast could support life; nature’s power of renovation was for the time suspended, and seemed extinct.  It was a desert which nothing could restore to fruitfulness except the slow mysterious forces of a geologic revolution.

Beyond the Sierra de Lanterna the Grand River was joined by the Green River, streaming down through gullied plateaux from the deserts of Utah and the mountains which tower between Oregon and Nebraska.  Henceforward, still locked in Titanic defiles or flanked by Cyclopean debris, they were on the Colorado of the West.

Thurstane meditated as to what course he should follow.  Should he strike southward by land for the Bernalillo trail, risking a march through a wide, rocky, lifeless, and perhaps waterless wilderness?  Or should he attempt to descend a river even more terrible to navigate than the San Juan?  It seemed to him that the hardships and dangers of either plan were about the same.

But the Colorado route would be the swiftest; the Colorado would take him quickest to Clara.  For he trusted that she had long before this got back to the Moqui country and resumed her journey across the continent.  He could not really fear that any deadly harm would befall her.  He had the firmness of a soldier and the faith of a lover.

At last, silently and solemnly, through a portal thousands of feet in height, the voyagers glided into the perilous mystery of the Great Canon of the Colorado, the most sublime and terrible waterway of this planet.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Thurstane had strange emotions as he swept into the “caverns measureless to man” of the Great Canon of the Colorado.

It seemed like a push of destiny rather than a step of volition.  An angel or a demon impelled him into the unknown; a supernatural portal had opened to give him passage; then it had closed behind him forever.