“I’ve told him we can’t pay him anything,” Rapp explained. “But if he wants to stay here and cook for you boys till I make my next trip, he’ll have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery stable in Tarpin. He says he’s a good cook, and I thought he might liven things up for you at Christmas time. He won’t bother you, he’s not got any of the mean ways of a bum4 — I know a bum when I see one. Next time I come down I’ll bring him some old clothes from the ranch5, and you can fire him if you want to. All his baggage is that newspaper bundle, and there’s nothing in it but shoes — a pair of patent leathers and a pair of sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off skylarking, you two, and leave him with the cattle. Not for an hour, mind you. He ain’t strong enough, and he’s got no head.”
Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a wonderful cook and a good housekeeper6. He kept that cabin shining like a playhouse; used to dress it all out with pi?on boughs7, and trimmed the kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. He had learned to make up cots when he was a hospital orderly, and he made our bunks9 feel like a Harvey House bed. To this day that’s the best I can say for any bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge10 against any of the people who had misused11 him. He loved to tell about the celebrated12 people he’d been steward to, and the liberal tips they had given him. There with us, where he couldn’t get at whisky, he was a model of good behaviour. “Drink is me weakness, you might say,” he occasionally remarked apologetically. He shaved every morning and was as clean as a pin. We got to be downright fond of him, and the three of us made a happy family.
Ever since we’d brought our herd13 down to the winter camp, the wild cattle on the mesa were more in evidence. They came down to the river to drink oftener, and loitered about, grazing in that low canyon14 so much that we began to call it Cow Canyon. They were fine-looking beasts, too. One could see they had good pasture up there. Henry had a theory that we ought to be able to entice15 them over to our side with salt. He wanted to kill one for beef-steaks. Soon after he joined us we lost two cows. Without warning they bolted into the mesa, as the foreman had said. After that we watched the herd closer; but a few days before Christmas, when Blake was off hunting and I was on duty, four fine young steers16 sneaked17 down to the water’s edge through the brush, and before I knew it they were swimming the river — seemed to do it with no trouble at all. They frisked out on the other side, ambled18 up the canyon, and disappeared. I was furious to have them steal a march on me, and I swore to myself I’d follow them over and drive them back.
The next morning we took the herd a few miles east, to keep them out of mischief19. I made some excuse to Blake, cut back to the cabin, and asked Henry to put me up a lunch. I told him my plan, but warned him not to bear tales. If I wasn’t home when Blake came in at night, then he could tell him where I’d gone.
Henry went down to the river with me to watch me across. It had grown colder since morning, and looked like snow. The old man was afraid of a storm; said I might get snowed in. But I’d got my nerve up, and I didn’t want to put off making a try at it. I strapped20 my blanket and my lunch on my shoulders, hung my boots around my neck to keep them dry, stuffed my socks inside my hat, and we waded21 in. My horse took the water without any fuss, though he shivered a good deal. He stepped out very carefully, and when it got too deep for him, he swam without panic. We were carried down-stream a little by the current, but I didn’t have to slide off his back. He found bottom after a while, and we easily made a landing. I waved good-bye to Henry on the other side and started up the canyon, running beside my horse to get warm.
The canyon was wide at the water’s edge, and though it corkscrewed back into the mesa by abrupt22 turns, it preserved this open, roomy character. It was, indeed, a very deep valley with gently sloping sides, rugged23 and rocky, but well grassed. There was a clear trail. Horses have no sense about making a trail, but you can trust cattle to find the easiest possible path and to take the lowest grades. The bluish rock and the sun-tanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the occasional cedars24 growing beside the boulders25 looked black that morning. It may have been the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley. It made my mouth and nostrils26 smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation I kept telling myself that it was very different from the air on the other side of the river, though that was pure and uncontaminated enough.
When I had gone up this canyon for a mile or so, I came upon another, opening out to the north — a box canyon, very different in character. No gentle slope there. The walls were perpendicular27, where they weren’t actually overhanging, and they were anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand feet high, as we afterward28 found by measurement. The floor of it was a mass of huge boulders, great pieces of rock that had fallen from above ages back, and had been worn round and smooth as pebbles29 by the long action of water. Many of them were as big as haystacks, yet they lay piled on one another like a load of gravel30. There was no footing for my horse among those smooth stones, so I hobbled him and went on alone a little way, just to see what it was like. My eyes were steadily31 on the ground — a slip of the foot there might cripple one.
It was such rough scrambling32 that I was soon in a warm sweat under my damp clothes. In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it, on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern33 in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as sculpture — and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.
It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling34 out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell35 of the masonry36. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble37 of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in colour, even on that grey day. In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak-leaves. A fringe of cedars grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and repose38 — immortal39 repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity40.
The falling snow-flakes, sprinkling the pi?ons, gave it a special kind of solemnity. I can’t describe it. It was more like sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible41 mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber42, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.
As I stood looking up at it, I wondered whether I ought to tell even Blake about it; whether I ought not to go back across the river and keep that secret as the mesa had kept it. When I at last turned away, I saw still another canyon branching out of this one, and in its was still another arch, with another group of buildings. The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a bee-hive; it was full of little cliff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe, a particular civilization.
That night when I got home Blake was on the river-bank waiting for me. I told him I’d rather not talk about my trip until after supper, — that I was beat out. I think he’d meant to upbraid43 me for sneaking44 off, but he didn’t. He seemed to realize from the first that this was a serious matter to me, and he accepted it in that way.
After supper, when we had lit our pipes, I told Blake and Henry as clearly as I could what it was like over there, and we talked it over. The town in the cliffs explained the irrigation ditches. Like all pueblo45 Indians, these people had had their farms away from their dwellings46. For a stronghold they needed rock, and for farming, soft earth and a water main.
“And this proves,” said Roddy, “that there must have been a trail into the mesa at the north end, and that they carried their harvest over by the ford47. If this Cow Canyon was the only entrance, they could never have farmed down here.” We agreed that he should go over on the first warm day, and try to find a trail up to the Cliff City, as we already called it.
We talked and speculated until after midnight. It was Christmas eve, and Henry said it was but right we should do something out of the ordinary. But after we went to bed, tired as I was, I was unable to sleep. I got up and dressed and put on my overcoat and slipped outside to get sight of the mesa. The wind had come up and was blowing the squall clouds across the sky. The moon was almost full, hanging directly over the mesa, which had never looked so solemn and silent to me before. I wondered how many Christmases had come and gone since that round tower was built. I had been to Acoma and the Hopi villages, but I’d never seen a tower like that one. It seemed to me to mark a difference. I felt that only a strong and aspiring48 people would have built it, and a people with a feeling for design. That cluster of buildings, in its arch, with the dizzy drop into empty air from its doorways49 and the wall of cliff above, was as clear in my mind as a picture. By closing my eyes I could see it against the dark, like a magic-lantern slide.
Blake got over the river before New Year’s day, but he didn’t find any way of getting from the bottom of the box canyon up into the Cliff City. He felt sure that the inhabitants of that sky village had reached it by a trail from the top of the mesa down, not from the bottom of the canyon up. He explored the branch canyons50 a little, and found four other villages, smaller than the first, placed in similar arches.
These arches we had often seen in other canyons. You can find them in the Grand Canyon, and all along the Rio Grande. Whenever the surface rock is much harder than the rock beneath it, the softer stone begins to crack and crumble51 with weather just at the line where it meets the hard rim8 rock. It goes on crumbling52 and falling away, and in time this wash-out grows to be a spacious53 cavern. The Cliff City sat in an unusually large cavern. We afterward found that it was three hundred and sixty feet long, and seventy feet high in the centre. The red tower was fifty feet in height.
Blake and I began to make plans. Our engagement with the Sitwell Company terminated in May. When we turned our cattle over to the foreman, we would go into the mesa with what food and tools we could carry, and try to find a trail down the north end, where we were sure there must once have been one. If we could find an easier way to get in and out of the mesa, we would devote the summer, and our winter’s wages, to exploring it. From Tarpin, the nearest railroad, we could get supplies and tools, and help if we needed it. We thought we could manage to do the work ourselves if old Henry would stay with us. We didn’t want to make our discovery any more public than necessary. We were reluctant to expose those silent and beautiful places to vulgar curiosity. Finally we outlined our plan to Henry, telling him we couldn’t promise him regular wages.
“We won’t mention it,” he said, waving his hand. “I’d ask nothing better than to share your fortunes. In me youth it was me ambition to go to Egypt and see the tombs of the Pharaohs.”
“You may get a bad cold going over the river, Henry,” Blake warned him. “It’s a bad crossing — makes you dizzy when you take to swimming. You have to keep your head.”
“I was never seasick54 in me life,” he declared, “and at that, I’ve helped in the cook’s galley55 on the Anchor Line when she was fair standing56 on her head. You’ll find me strong and active when I’m once broke into the work. I come of an enduring family, though, to be sure, I’ve abused me constitution somewhat.”
Henry liked to talk about his family, and the work they’d done, and the great age to which they lived, and the brandy puddings his mother made. “Eighteen we was in all, when we sat down at table,” he would often say with his thin, apologetic smile. “Mother and father, and ten living, and four dead, and two still-born.” Roddy and I used to strain our imagination trying to visualize57 such a family dinner party.
Everything worked out well for us. The foreman showed so much interest in our plans that we told him everything. He insisted that we should stay on at the winter camp as long as we needed a home base, and use up whatever supplies were left. When he paid us off, he sold us our two horses at a very reasonable figure.
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1
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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steward
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| n.乘务员，服务员；看管人；膳食管理员 | |
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outfit
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| n.（为特殊用途的）全套装备，全套服装 | |
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bum
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| n.臀部；流浪汉，乞丐；vt.乞求，乞讨 | |
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ranch
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| n.大牧场，大农场 | |
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housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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rim
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| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
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bunks
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| n.（车、船等倚壁而设的）铺位( bunk的名词复数 )；空话，废话v.（车、船等倚壁而设的）铺位( bunk的第三人称单数 )；空话，废话 | |
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grudge
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| n.不满，怨恨，妒嫉；vt.勉强给，不情愿做 | |
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11
misused
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| v.使用…不当( misuse的过去式和过去分词 )；把…派作不正当的用途；虐待；滥用 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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entice
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| v.诱骗，引诱，怂恿 | |
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steers
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| n.阉公牛，肉用公牛( steer的名词复数 )v.驾驶( steer的第三人称单数 )；操纵；控制；引导 | |
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17
sneaked
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| v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 )；偷偷溜走；（儿童向成人）打小报告；告状 | |
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18
ambled
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| v.（马）缓行( amble的过去式和过去分词 )；从容地走，漫步 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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20
strapped
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| adj.用皮带捆住的，用皮带装饰的；身无分文的；缺钱；手头紧v.用皮带捆扎(strap的过去式和过去分词)；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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21
waded
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| （从水、泥等）蹚，走过，跋( wade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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cedars
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| 雪松，西洋杉( cedar的名词复数 ) | |
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boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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perpendicular
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| adj.垂直的，直立的；n.垂直线，垂直的位置 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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pebbles
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| [复数]鹅卵石； 沙砾； 卵石，小圆石( pebble的名词复数 ) | |
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gravel
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| n.砂跞；砂砾层；结石 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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scrambling
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| v.快速爬行( scramble的现在分词 )；攀登；争夺；（军事飞机）紧急起飞 | |
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cavern
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| n.洞穴，大山洞 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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swell
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| vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强 | |
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masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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jumble
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| vt.使混乱，混杂；n.混乱；杂乱的一堆 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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41
inaccessible
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| adj.达不到的，难接近的 | |
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42
amber
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| n.琥珀；琥珀色；adj.琥珀制的 | |
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43
upbraid
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| v.斥责，责骂，责备 | |
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44
sneaking
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| a.秘密的，不公开的 | |
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45
pueblo
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| n.（美国西南部或墨西哥等）印第安人的村庄 | |
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46
dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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47
Ford
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| n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过 | |
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48
aspiring
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| adj.有志气的；有抱负的；高耸的v.渴望；追求 | |
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49
doorways
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| n.门口，门道( doorway的名词复数 ) | |
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50
canyons
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| n.峡谷( canyon的名词复数 ) | |
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51
crumble
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| vi.碎裂，崩溃；vt.弄碎，摧毁 | |
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52
crumbling
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| adj.摇摇欲坠的 | |
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53
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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54
seasick
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| adj.晕船的 | |
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55
galley
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| n.（飞机或船上的）厨房单层甲板大帆船；军舰舰长用的大划艇； | |
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56
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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57
visualize
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| vt.使看得见，使具体化，想象，设想 | |
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