High in the black cliff a star-shaped, wind-worn hole let the blue sky through.

There was cheer in Naab’s “Getup,” now, and the horses quickened with it.  Their iron-shod hoofs struck fire from the rosy road.  “Easy, easy—­ soho!” cried Naab to his steeds.  In the pitchy blackness under the shelving cliff they picked their way cautiously, and turned a corner.  Lights twinkled in Hare’s sight, a fresh breeze, coming from water, dampened his cheek, and a hollow rumble, a long roll as of distant thunder, filled his ears.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That, my lad, is what I always love to hear.  It means I’m home.  It’s the roar of the Colorado as she takes her first plunge into the Canyon.”

IV THE OASIS

August Naab’s oasis was an oval valley, level as a floor, green with leaf and white with blossom, enclosed by a circle of colossal cliffs of vivid vermilion hue.  At its western curve the Colorado River split the red walls from north to south.  When the wind was west a sullen roar, remote as of some far-off driving mill, filled the valley; when it was east a dreamy hollow hum, a somnolent song, murmured through the cottonwoods; when no wind stirred, silence reigned, a silence not of serene plain or mountain fastness, but shut in, compressed, strange, and breathless.  Safe from the storms of the elements as well as of the world was this Garden of Eschtah.

Naab had put Hare to bed on the unroofed porch of a log house, but routed him out early, and when Hare lifted the blankets a shower of cotton-blossoms drifted away like snow.  A grove of gray-barked trees spread green canopy overhead, and through the intricate web shone crimson walls, soaring with resistless onsweep up and up to shut out all but a blue lake of sky.

“I want you to see the Navajos cross the river,” said Naab.

Hare accompanied him out through the grove to a road that flanked the first rise of the red wall; they followed this for half a mile, and turning a corner came into an unobstructed view.  A roar of rushing waters had prepared Hare, but the river that he saw appalled him.  It was red and swift; it slid onward like an enormous slippery snake; its constricted head raised a crest of leaping waves, and disappeared in a dark chasm, whence came a bellow and boom.

“That opening where she jumps off is the head of the Grand Canyon,” said Naab.  “It’s five hundred feet deep there, and thirty miles below it’s five thousand.  Oh, once in, she tears in a hurry!  Come, we turn up the bank here.”

Hare could find no speech, and he felt immeasurably small.  All that he had seen in reaching this isolated spot was dwarfed in comparison.  This “Crossing of the Fathers,” as Naab called it, was the gateway of the desert.  This roar of turbulent waters was the sinister monotone of the mighty desert symphony of great depths, great heights, great reaches.