CHAPTER XX. THE ASSAYERS.

A certain room in El Palacio is devoted to assaying the precious ores. Its blackened, time-stained rafters look as though they might fall any moment; but believers in luck rest in calm assurance that the catastrophe will not occur in their time. Vainly is the tale told how the very day Governor Merriwether took possession of the Palace, to assume the executive duties of the territory, the roof of the room in which he had once been a prisoner fell in. Nobody scares at that old story now. The slanting beam overhead will not drop till we are out of the way; the crumbling adobes will hold together awhile yet. No use running till you are hurt. There is too much actual danger about us to allow the sensationalist a chance to waken fears.

The mud walls of the room I speak of were once papered; but the hanging has flaked off, revealing the brown ground, making splotches here and there, like a disease. Cobwebs of pre-historic antiquity hang in lines, like ropes of dirty rags. The one north window is obscured by dust and fly-specks, the dull panes and deep walls letting in a dim and not religious light. It was formerly a bedroom, I believe. Of the living things which still may burrow in the walls, as the French women say, I beseech you to suppose them. The bare floor is dusty and gritty with sand. In one corner is a barrel of charcoal; beside it pine kindling and old newspapers. A long pine table holds the assayer’s tools--the many contrivances necessary to his vocation. Scales that weigh with the delicate nicety of Portia’s, blow-pipes, bottles of acids, mortar and pestles, little hammers, and sieves, beside waiting specimens, done up in muslin, carefully separated and labeled. Such stones come in every mail, every train, every ambulance, every pocket. “Blossom rocks” adorn window-sill and mantelpiece, street-corners and counters, serve as paper-weights and door-props, and are a stumbling-block and rock of offense along the sidewalks.

I am not here to talk of chlorides, pyrites, sulphurets, silica, and manganese; but only to remark, _en passant_, that free gold and ruby silver are pretty terms--very pretty, indeed--and easily understood by any lady in the land.

At this table presides the refiner and purifier of silver--the Man of Destiny. It may be a Freiburg professor, with flowing beard and a name in harsh discord with the mellifluous Spanish titles, or a graduate of a New York school of mines. No matter. He understands his business and on his fiat hang hopes high as the sky, for to him are submitted samples of raw ores believed valuable, and now comes the question: Is the deposit represented rich enough to justify deep digging--in other words, to make a mine of? The honest miner’s flush of hope and sinking of fear are comparable only to the tremor of the quivering aspirant for literary fame, who, with darling MS. in hand, respectfully addresses the torturer, and withdraws to await his doom.

The small, square furnace glows with fervent heat, and the room is suffocating. With beaded forehead and dripping chin, the assayer weighs, pulverizes, sifts the fine dust in the cupels, to undergo the only sure test, the trial by fire. His hidden power revives the old romantic ideas of scholars, to whom the ancient and secret science of alchemy was a religion, part of the sublime, cabalistic wisdom revealed unto Adam, to console him for the loss of Paradise; for which study philosophers shut themselves up to lifelong toil in cells and caves. He is of the order of mystics, who grew lean and pale pondering brass-bound volumes of wicked-looking hieroglyphs; who understood the charm of the burning belt and the ciphered girdle. He deals with strange crucibles and subtle compounds; by a wizard spell masters the forces of the earth, the transmutation of metals, and by magic numbers discovers the golden secrets of Nature. While the cabala combination is being applied, that laboratory is the center of many hopes.

How often, ah! _how_ often does it prove the gold is dull lead, the silver is become dross. The waiting miner is “not in harmonization with his environments.” He hovers about the Palace, trying to cover his eager anxiety under the studied stoicism of the frontiersman. Sometimes the sun looks down upon him, as it rises, and finds him a patient watcher, waiting for the cooling of the metal. He has silently outwatched the stars, only to learn that specimens believed very rich (his darling promises) are worthless--not a speck, not a pinhead of precious mineral to be seen in a dozen cupels. What he held was so much fairy gold that turns to dust and dross.

The gold-seeker, in the first chill of disappointment, refuses to credit the report; but the refiner’s furnace has spoken with tongues of fire. There is the evidence of his own senses; he cannot doubt the testimony. He quickly recovers his stolid composure, takes a square meal, possibly a square drink, and, led by the spirit of unrest, is ready to face the inevitable hardships of another long search for rich leads.

He rises, after an adverse stroke of fate, buoyant as ever with irrepressible hope--as Dr. Johnson says of second marriages, “the triumph of hope over experience.” In the morning the disappointment seems like something belonging to the vanished night. Five, eight, ten years may have brought nothing but anxiety, excitement, ill-luck; but his superior sagacity and daring _must_ win at last.

Away he goes, with _burro_ and “pard,” off on another prospecting tour, across unmeasured wastes of sand, under a brassy sky, over alkali plains, lava-beds, and waterless _pasturas_, which lead to springs that may be poison.

A childish credulity weakens the judgment of the honest miner. He accepts without reserve the pleasing myths which form a sort of legendary history; the unwritten annals of gold and silver-bearing mountains. Airy fables, poetic traditions are received as authentic records. There are delightful touches in these tales, with which I should love to embellish and enrich my page; but not to-day. They belong to the mysteries and subtleties known only to the elect--the chosen few who see behind the cloud spanned with promise, iris-hued and glittering, the prize awaiting the venturesome Argonaut.

The pay-streak is possibly in a _vega_ of sea-like vastness and level; but more likely in the stony mountain heart, threaded by shining lines, as the crimson veins warm ours. Wherever it is, he is the man to strike it. And this conviction abides with him, a constant happiness, as he traverses the length and breadth of the mineral region.

Do you laugh at his fond delusions?

The mania for precious metals is not a modern craze. It is older than the Pyramids.

Is he chasing a chimera?

No, dear reader, he is feeling his way in the checkered path which all men at some period of their lives have sought ever since the first prospector groped along the strand down by the storied Euphrates, that dim and shadowy river, winding between myth and history, which waters the old, old land Havilah, where there is gold.

If a cold-blooded newcomer advises the honest miner to settle down to some good, steady, legitimate business, he rejects the idea with lofty scorn. That is well enough for the cautious idiot, who does not know a true fissure-vein when he sees it. The every-day trades, the tame, beaten paths are not in the prospector’s line of march. He is for the short cut to fortune. Familiar with dangers, there is one foe he cannot fight. In lone hillsides and desolate cañons there is lying in wait for him an enemy more deadly than the skulking Apache--a peculiar form of intermittent fever, called mountain fever. It lurks in the air, ready to lift the dread cloud hiding the mystery which forever enshrouds the Unseen World.

The human race is nomadic, and the old Aryan blood is strong, and crops out on the _vegas_ of the Rocky Mountains clearly as on the arid plains of Mesopotamia. To be sure, in Adam we are all one, and he was a quiet citizen of the world. In Noah we are all three, and after the Deluge--but this is getting into deep water.

_Revenons._ Occasionally it happens that a sample of ore, “the queer-looking stuff” on which moderate expectation is based, is brought out of the furnace, and the button in the cupel is not silver, but a lump of pure gold. O rapturous moment known to the few, the beloved children of Fate! O day to be remembered under the coffin-lid! The owner of such returns (not larger than a pea) treads on air. He tries to hide his exultation; but the secret will out. He plans; he builds. He is going to sail the seas; to start before many days to hear the syrens of the Mediterranean; to visit the abiding-places of poetry and history, the lands of undying summer; to see the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. And well may he dream dreams and see visions! Money is but another name for freedom. He who holds it has all the world before him where to choose his place of rest.

My reader, familiar with “The Last of the Barons,” may remember the picture of Adam Warner endeavoring to turn copper into gold. In the solitude genius everywhere creates for itself, by night and by day, hanging over the burning Eureka, stinting himself and child to feed the devouring furnace, asking no sympathy in his lonely chamber, living apart with his works and fancies, like a god amidst his creations, and coming very near the grand discovery concealed for a later generation to penetrate. The fascination of mining is what those elder sages experienced in a lifelong witchery over minds bent to the study of alchemy. What wonder men were devoted to a pursuit, in which even Bacon and Newton wasted precious hours, which promised results so august? Besides costly chemicals, there were thrown into the crucibles youth, health, hope, love, yes, life itself, to vanish as vapor, slowly, slowly, surely, surely.

The worst thing about mining, as formerly about alchemy, is that it allures on its victims to destruction. One gets near and ever nearer the object; so trifling a sum additional will complete the work and secure the promise. Time, toil, expensive appliances are demanded; but the glorious result justifies all these, and many another risk more fearful.

Nature has done in the Rocky Mountains precisely what the ancient sages tried to do. Here the last secret combination has produced the medium; the striking hammer is smiting the rocks; in the death-like stillness of remote solitudes the blow reverbates, and at its compelling stroke the earth opens, and lo! the philosopher’s stone is discovered. Prospero’s wand was not mightier.

At night the clear, red glow of the furnace reddens the walls of the assayer’s room, coats with bright gilding gloomy rafters overhead, and lends a sickly light to the flickering flame of the coal-oil lamp. Then the place is suggestive of the great centre of the earth, where doomed souls go wandering up and down in a joyless, endless wrestling with fire. The silent men are like dismal ghosts. If they speak, it is in repressed tones. Their low voices, the obscurity of the room, the intense heat, the air of secrecy and mystery give the feeling that some agony is conducting--a battle, a fire, a drama involving high interests. The mighty cause is a tragedy; possibly a crime.

Sometimes a woman, a girlish shape, looks in with innocent eyes, as though she thought the assayer in woeful peril. She flits away like a spirit blest, wandering from the cool, sweet fields Elysian, to pity for one moment the sad dwellers in the near purgatory.

Souls in torment are here, in fact, when “specimens” on which star-high hopes were grounded prove to be fire-clay and galena, and the long, slow dream is as a vision of the night.

The conduct of some “miner men,” after a claim has been located, and the one hundred dollars’ worth of work which the law exacts is done, is a study. In this age of doubt and question, their unwavering faith gives us fresh confidence in skeptical, sorely-tried human nature. They gaze into narrow prospect-holes, about the size of a seventy-five barrel cistern, with a depth of trust, an immovable resting on the promise in the future comparable with nothing I know, except the serene complacency of the setting hen. She feels the stir of life beneath her brooding wings, and he has visions

----“impalpable and unperceived Of other’s sight.”

You see only a hole in the ground; a shallow cistern which holds no water. Nature has revealed her secrets to him, as she does not to the unbeliever. Hence his robust faith.

From that prospect-hole riches will roll up by the bucketful.

“How will they get up?” asks the uninspired tourist, heartlessly.

Honest miner, teetering a scrap of galena on his forefinger, stares steadily at the faint mountain-line and murmurs: “Oh! I must bide my time. One of these days capital will come along--capital will come along--come along--along.”

It must be admitted that capital is often a good while on the road. This hour, scores about us are prospecting, opening abandoned workings, following the ancient Tegua-Spanish traces, with hopeful hearts. They are enchanters. Hear them talk, and you behold the beauty of which they dream. They have neither crucibles nor carpet, nor do they pour ink in your palm, as Hassan did; yet are they prophets and seers, and their visions all foreshow another Leadville.

The Lodestone Rocks are not far off. Come not near, unless you are ready to be dashed against them.

Only fifty dollars laid out in work, and a mine possibly worth thousands. _Quien sabe?_ “Who knows?” “Who knows?”

Taking a stern Methodist view of the business as now proceeding in the territories, I should call mining a game of chance--exciting, fascinating, bewildering--which defrauds no one but yourself.