After some minutes of dumb show they came down from their stronghold and dispersed to their dwellings.  They seemed to be utterly without curiosity; the warriors put aside their bows and lay down to sleep; the old squaw hurried off to pick up her bundle of fuel; even the papooses were silent and stupid.  It was a race lower than the Hottentots or the Australians.  Short, meagre, badly built, excessively ugly, they were nearly naked, and their slight clothing was rags of skins.  Thurstane tried to buy food of them, but either they had none to spare or his buttons seemed to them of no value.  Nor could he induce any one to accompany him as a guide.

“Do ye think Godamighty made thim paple?” inquired Sweeny.

“Reckon so,” replied Glover.

“I don’t belave it,” said Sweeny.  “He’d be in more rispactable bizniss.  It’s me opinyin the divil made um for a joke on the rest av us.  An’ it’s me opinyin he made this whole counthry for the same rayson.”

“The priest’ll tell ye God made all men, Sweeny.”

“They ain’t min at all.  Thim crachurs ain’t min.  They’re nagurs, an’ a mighty poor kind at that.  I hate um.  I wish they was all dead.  I’ve kilt some av um, an’ I’m goin’ to kill slathers more, God willin’.  I belave it’s part av the bizniss av white min to finish off the nagurs.”

Profound and potent sentiment of race antipathy!  The contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages.  It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has entitled “the survival of the fittest,” and Darwin, “natural selection.”

The party continued to ascend the canon.  At short intervals branch canons exhibited arid and precipitous gorges, more and more gloomy with twilight.  It was impossible to choose between one and another.  The travellers could never see three hundred yards in advance.  To right and left they were hemmed in by walls fifteen hundred feet in height.  Only one thing was certain:  these altitudes were gradually diminishing; and hence they knew that they were mounting the plateau.  At last, four hours after leaving Diamond Creek, wearied to the marrow with incessant toil, they halted by a little spring, stretched themselves on a scrap of starveling grass, and chewed their meagre, musty supper.

The scenery here was unearthly.  Barring the bit of turf and a few willows which had got lost in the desert, there was not a tint of verdure.  To right and left rose two huge and steep slopes of eroded and ragged rocks, tortured into every conceivable form of jag, spire, pinnacle, and imagery.  In general the figures were grotesque; it seemed as if the misshapen gods of India and of China and of barbarous lands had gathered there; as if this were a place of banishment and punishment for the fallen idols of all idolatries.  Above this coliseum of monstrosities rose a long line of sharp, jagged needles, like a vast chevaux-de-frise, forbidding escape.  Still higher, lighted even yet by the setting sun, towered five cones of vast proportions.  Then came cliffs capped by shatters of tableland, and then the long, even, gleaming ledge of the final plateau.