CHAPTER XXIII. MINE EXPERIENCE.
The reader who graciously follows me to the end of this brief history will readily comprehend why it must be somewhat obscure. “I could a tale unfold” better worth the hearing, but like the poor ghost I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house. It need harrow up no soul to hint that the scene was laid and drama played not a thousand miles from Tucson, Arizona.
Imagine a _vega_ of sea-like vastness, in a rock-setting of ghostly Sierras whose rent crags pierce through the rich blue air far above the snow line. In the primeval years the Apaches possessed the country, and with the poetic instinct which never quite forsakes the savagest of savages they called this range the Mist-Befringed Mountains. To reach the valley from the west, we leave the main road and cross rough masses of lava which block the way. The seeming barrier ends in a narrow pass, a mile or so from wall to wall,--a mighty stone corridor stately as Karnak, and gloomy with the all-pervading silence of death. At the end is a high natural gateway of red granite; passing under it we emerge into a smooth expanse level as water, an amphitheatre whose blank surface is relieved by scattered masses of lava upheaved in some fiery earthquake long stilled their rigid outlines jagged and bristling.
There is no verdure to soften the foothills so savagely hacked and split in yawning cracks. No tender moss, no shrub, no sparkling water or waving branches brighten the leaden hues of the gray desert; treeless, windless, waterless. If herbage ever grew there it is now overdrifted with sand. The wonderful mirage--most marvelous of Nature’s mysteries--swims over it in the dreamy haze of early morning. A deep, dark coolness follows the burning day, and the jeweled sky, of opal and turquoise, is unspeakably beautiful. Other change there is none.
It would seem a place for the unclean condor to lay her eggs on the bare rocks, and the eagle to wheel and scream and stir up her nest with wings which battle the storm; but there is no trace of bird or insect life, no wolf or antelope, coyote or lizard.
It is the one place in which I have stood where the earth is as still as the sky. Suppose we call the dreary region with its adamantine rocks the Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. There in the beginning silence set her seal, unbroken till eighteen hundred and--some odd years. For reasons obvious, I cannot be exact regarding dates.
In a memorable hour the death-like hush was startled by the ring of a single hammer on the torn mountain wall at the west end of the _vega_. Blow on blow against the riven clefts resounded through the warm blue silence.
Was it a Bostonian seeking the Infinite? Did he see beyond the verge of sight, like the young Aladdin led on by the Genii of the Cave?
All day the one man toiled, digging, hewing, breaking, scraping pieces of stone with a pen-knife. What he sought he evidently found, put some of it in his pockets, other portions in his haversack, and wound out of the cavernous gloom at sunset through the narrow defile to the world outside the lifeless plain. He is brave beyond the bravest who would stay there till midnight,
“Alone in the terrible waste with God.”
A week passed, and one crisp and clear morning--owing to very high altitude the nights here are always cool--three men passed under the rock gateway, each with tools and determination of iron. Steadily they worked in the long hot day, stopping for lunch and a short rest at noon. Only the all seeing eye was upon them, no human ear was there to hear, yet at intervals they looked around as though in an enemy’s country, and their rare speech was in suppressed voices. They bent with faces to the ground as children hunt for nuts. They peered into cracks and crevices and pried up loose stones, scattered _débris_, broke them open, and gazed at their interior under a hand mirror. Occasionally the lightest man, a mere stripling, mounted the shoulders of the other two and seized something above their heads. Were they a trio of poets obeying the charge of the Bard of the Sierras, “Lean your ladder not against the clouds, but against the solid Rocky Mountains and climb there?” They saw something which thrilled their pulses, and bore off a load in sacks just as the snow crowned peaks blushed with the ineffable beauty of the afterglow. Then darkness leaped from the mountain walls and held the valley, in the starry silence, lone as the land Havillah before the first gold seekers crossed the river on their endless quest.
Another week brought a picnic party largely composed of ladies, two gentlemen in army blue, girls made of roses and dimples, curls and ribbons, young men with eager, handsome faces. Rocky Mountain ladies are always well mounted and are fearless horsewomen. Diana Vernon might envy their dash and daring, and in this rarified atmosphere horses are mettlesome and endure as they cannot in the low countries. There was much prancing and spurring through the rugged defile, and many a rider less bold would have been unseated even on the sure-footed ponies. They brought little twigs of _pinones_ from the _cañons_ and made fires with matches scraped on boot heels; they unpacked hampers, opened cans, played games, shouted, sung, wild with overflowing spirits; they ate, drank and were merry, all the while hunting and hunting. Lovers strayed in pairs to dusky recesses in the mountain rim, not on purpose to be lost nor to find the four-leaf clover, nor yet to learn how to make love dials of daisies. They sought something more than the hasty charm of a stolen kiss. They looked for shining stones, gleaming metal, precious clay, and every one carried in a pocket handkerchief minute sections of the adamantine Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon. Even uninstructed eyes can trace the rust colored, red-brown lines of “blossom rock,” and it is following a captivating lead to yield one’s self to its beguiling ways.
One youth and maiden tracked it far up the _cañon_ to a gnarled and twisted pine which overhung the edge of a sheer crag to which it clung by roots clutching like claws. In the dry, dewless air the needles of the pine lay in soft carpeting undisturbed for ages. They sat and rested beneath the skeleton tree, and listened to soft æolian airs faintly stirring the bare branches overhead. Then she sang in the sweetest voice:
“Is this a dream? Then waking would be pain.”
And in answer he tossed up his cap and it lodged in the pine, and they clapped their hands in an impromptu chorus, “No, no, no! a thousand times, no!” If there be elves in the Mist-Befringed Mountains they must have laughed at this frolicsome glee, for such sounds are a new revelation there. The young couple were not crazy, they had heaved up a rough brown stone, and striking it with a heavy hammer they saw--_ay de mi!_ the electric flash of wedding rings. The zigzag lines of “blossom rock” held wreaths of orange flowers, hitherto unattainable, and now they felt so near their sweetness they were filled with delight. The poor young things had thought best to bear their poverty apart (he was a second lieutenant), but now they could hear marriage bells in every stroke of the magic hammer, in every throb of their happy hearts.
A stray dove, bewildered and lost, lighted at their feet, tame because ignorant of men, and they hailed the gentle bird as an omen. Then he called her his dove-eyed darling, talking the sweet foolery my gray-haired reader laughs at, but would give a year of peaceful life to hear again for one half-hour.
O day of bridal brightness whose splendor lives in the illuminated Book of Chronicles!--let me linger a moment over its unfading beauty. The lovers locked their happy arms together and trod lightly over enchanted ground, in the silence of perfect happiness,--all that is left us of the lost language of Eden. Wherever their sparkling glances fell, myrtles sprung up. O never, on land, or in sea, grew flowers like those which bloomed in their foot-prints along the sandy beds of “blossom rock.”
The lieutenant was bare-headed, for he never got his cap, though he stoned it valiantly and even shot his revolver at the limb where it hung. A frontier lady is full of expedients as Robinson Crusoe, and the girl he loved, with deft and tasteful fingers devised a cap from her silken kerchief and trimmed it with a drooping feather from her own riding hat. Very proud was the face beneath it, and he bowed in admiration of her ingenuity and murmured some soft nonsense you do not care to hear.
They joined the party in the plain with an assumption of indifference, transparent as mica,--a flimsy ruse, old as the oldest lovers,--and of course every one saw just how matters stood the instant they appeared. He went to look after the pony, tied by a _lariat_ to a block of stone, patted her never so gently, stroked her mane, and called her “Pretty girl, pretty girl.” The maiden sat on a striped Navayo blanket and in an arch bewitching way sang to an old Spanish air full of trills and graces this song:
“QUIEN SABE?”[17]
I.
“The breeze of the evening that cools the hot air, That kisses the orange and shakes out thy hair, Is its freshness less welcome, less sweet its perfume, That you know not the region from whence it is come? Whence the wind blows, where the wind goes, Hither, and thither, and whither--who knows? Who knows? Hither and thither--but whither--who knows?
II.
“The river forever glides singing along, The rose on the bank bends adown to its song, And the flower, as it listens, unconsciously dips Till the rising wave glistens and kisses its lips. But why the wave rises and kisses the rose, And why the rose stops for those kisses--who knows? Who knows? And away flows the river--but whither--who knows?
III.
“Let _me_ be the breeze, love, that wanders along The river that ever rejoices in song; Be _thou_ to my fancy the orange in bloom, The rose by the river that gives its perfume. Would the fruit be so golden, so fragrant the rose, If no breeze and no wave were to kiss them? Who knows? Who knows? If no breeze and no wave were to kiss them? Who knows?”
Before the singer lay the desert grim and bare, girdled by scarred, seamed mountains--a boundary wall touched with purplish tints of supreme beauty. Behind her, a dim outline of snow and granite in the far horizon, the Sierra Nevada projected against the rainless blue, the blade of snow-white teeth which suggested its Castilian name. The valley had a fascination from its absolute loneliness. Not a cloud flecked the blue above, not a breath stirred the air while the song was sung.
The elders gave it a divided attention, being intent on lumps of treasure which they “hefted” in their palms, balanced on their forefingers, and gazed at affectionately through a glass into which they puckered their eyelids, making gathers of the crow’s feet quite frightful to see. As each one passed the glass to his neighbor he nodded in dumb approval, with a look of mystery smiling and smiling, and the more enthusiastic winked and rubbed their hands as it went the rounds.
Such witchcraft is there in one small hand mirror!
After lunch at picnics there is usually a period of “nooning” while gentlemen smoke and ladies recline, or seek _siestas_ in friendly shade; but there was no quiet here and to the last no flagging of the high festivity.
A rose-blush of exquisite haze, a phantasm “mystic, wonderful,” floating through the vapory architecture of the Sierras, seemed the very soul of the halcyon day. The adorable girl who turned more than one head by smoking cigarettes, waved her hand at the shade and called loudly, “Look, see, the day is dying, its spirit is passing. Turn your faces to the west and be attentive.”
Gaily they hastened to gather round the fair speaker. With low mutterings and many tragic gestures she drew a circle in the sand, stood in the centre and blew a whiff of smoke, north, south, east, west, as Moqui Indians invoke the sun with their incantations.
“Now,” said the self-elected priestess, with solemn accent, “now watch without speech or breath, and we will have a token and a sign from the god of the Pueblos.”
Humoring her fancy, they waited in silence and lo! before their eyes the shape darkened, glowed, transmuted into a mass of glittering gold.
“The oracles have answered,” she cried. “Good bye, O Sun, ruler of this hour, take thanks from thy white children for the golden promise of to-day. Believers, salute him.”
All obeyed, and with bare head and uproarious cheers waved hats and handkerchiefs in good bye to the day and the friendly powers that be. The merry cavalcade, laughing and shouting, rode straight into the golden fire and flaming snow, each one carrying heavy weights of stone, every heart beating lightly.
Rapidly the voices died away. The metallic luster of the sky melted into opalescent pearl and purple. Day and night kissed and parted. Suddenly the stars looked out in serene eternal beauty on the smouldering fires, the vanishing trace of man, and the _vega_ alone with the night,--the hushed desolation doubly drear for the apparition of loveliness which endured but for a day.
The next morning brought more men with picks and hammers, mules laden with kegs of water, shovels and various cooking utensils and traps. There was a stir and bustle, two tents were pitched; a conspicuous figure was a cook “come up from de Souf durin’ de wah,”--sign of a permanent camp. Against stubborn clay and quartz rock work goes on slowly, but it did go on in the Mist-Befringed Mountains. It took many weeks to survey a certain district and make excavations, one deep as a well. They were made against obstacles which daunt men of weak will; lack of fuel, lack of water, torrid sun-heat, chill, benumbing nights. The plain was dotted with holes very like graves, marked with little pine head-boards bearing dates and figures. They have sweet names: “Baby Mine,” “Golden Fleece,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Maud Muller,” “Highland Mary,” “Daystar,” “The Fair Ophelia.” This last is the deepest excavation.
Usually claim stakes, for such they are, in out-of-the-way places mark the “Old Bourbon,” “The Right Bower,” “Dying Gasp,” “Wake up, Jake,” “New Deal,” “Chance Shot,” “The Blue Pup,” and so on. The titles are indication of the vein of tender sentiment which runs deep in the heart of woman. Evidently gentle souls fluttered about the head-boards when they were set in the ground. They were standing there to-day.
* * * * * * *
That row of stars, dear reader, means,
“Thoughts which do lie too deep for tears.”
* * * * *
Sometimes in quiet Sunday afternoons a party of lovely women, the charmed number not less than the graces nor more than the muses, ride out from Las Lunas, through the frowning avenue and lonesome gorge, and haunt the silent valley as mourners are wont to linger about new-made graves. To avoid trouble in remembering names I group them.
Allow me to present my charming friends the Pleiads. Years, tears, or study, perhaps all combined, have dimmed the brilliance of one face. They tread softly and slowly, are very depressed, and appear to find a mourner’s consolation in reading the head-boards. Under the funeral shadow cast by the overhanging pine (the Lieutenant’s cap is still there) they sit on newly spaded earth and compare experience and sorrows. A dove in the skeleton tree, listening, might hear subdued laments: “O why did I touch the ‘Sleeping Beauty?’” “‘Of all the sad words of tongue or pen,’” “‘All that glitters is not gold,’” and as they bend above the “Highland Mary,” one hums an old song, beginning:
“Thou lingering star with lessening ray.”
Sung with tenderness and pathos it floats through the deathlike stillness like a dirge. Can it be possible these sad-eyed mourners are the bright spirits of the picnic, who made that shining day
----“a beauteous dream, If it had been no more?”
’Twere vain to tell thee all.
Just when it matters not, these women pondered over maps, meaningless to them as the fifteen puzzle which has proved the streak of idiocy in the entire human family; over Miner’s Handbooks, over the “Prospector’s Complete Guide to Wealth.” They grew familiar with frightful engravings, flaming pictures of red hot underground machinery, lurid as the Insurance Chromo. Light literature and the newspapers were forsaken, and instead their tables were littered with such pamphlets as “Treatises on the Patent Amalgamator,” “The best method of reducing Argentiferous Ores,” and “The Hydraulic Ram,”--a horrible subject. The feminine mind does not readily adjust itself to this sort of lore, and though novel and highly instructive they were forced to confess it was “trying.” The owner of “The Fair Ophelia” almost lost her reason in a frantic and futile effort to master the workings of the diamond drill, and to comprehend the advantages the double oscillating cylinder engine has over the steel or percussive system of drilling.
While these exhaustive studies went on, the students discoursed of fissure veins, of float, leads, developments, face rock, bed rock, pyrites, chlorides, sulphurets. Alternating anguish and ecstacy shook their slender frames; one day brought a dazzling promise, the next a blank contradiction which told on their nerves with the force of a blow. Everything was shifting and uncertain except the assessments. There was a sense of security in having one thing to be relied on, and they were brought in with exact regularity. The moon did not wax and wane with more unvarying certainty, and obligations of all sorts were met with unquestioning promptness, not to say alacrity.
How many months’ pay went into these rich experiences your historian is unable to record. The Pleiads, though brilliant in the social circle, were not trained to strict business habits, and it is possible, indeed quite probable, no account of expense was kept. In that time the battered old pun about lying on your oars (not to be despised and able to bear a good deal of abuse yet) was dinned in ears to which the antique witticism was already familiar. The note of warning fell lightly as snow falls on snow, leaving no imprint; and the toilsome excavating went bravely on. A judicious friend--merely a looker-on--advised selling out. The old frontiersman was assailed with indignant scorn. Much learning had made him mad.
“What! sell out now, _now_, in the face of such a prospect.”
“After all this outlay!”
“After holding on so long! Now!”
“Not if I know myself.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
“Nor I.”
Before the seven-fold chorus and harpings the dismayed counsellor hastily retreated to his adobe office, and the Pleiads looked forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.
Patient investigation fails to show up (unconsciously one drops into mining phrase in mining countries) any offer to buy, but the very thought of selling out was rousing--a reflection on the fair owner of “The Fair Ophelia.” Varying rapture and despair wore those lovely women to faded spectres, for the long, slow lesson of waiting is a fearful strain on tense nerves. Well for their balance is it that housekeeping is so difficult on the barren frontier.
Despite the wholesome restraint of domestic duty, the daily task of making something out of nothing, they wiled away long afternoons telling stories worthy the best days of Monte Cristo, Captain Kidd and the gallant Sinbad. A childish credulity overtook them. Though highly intellectual and very superior, educated in modern “culture” (Boston accent), they showed a capacity for belief that was amazing.
How diligently they groped along the tangled lines on the agonizing maps! How glibly they talked of metalliferous foothills, of bonanza kings, of “extracting” and “separating processes,” of running galleries and driven tunnels. You know it is the amateur who is most sanguine in every enterprise. The joint stock of enthusiasm owned by the Pleiads lightened the way but was not inexhaustible. Notwithstanding enlivening converse in learned phrase--a kind of foreign language--hope flickered, the fever burned their eyes into hollows, and the judicious friend shook his white head in secret, forecasting how long this sort of thing was going to last.
When the crisis came Electra fainted dead away,--dropped as if shot through the heart. She was a good deal reduced with study of secrets hid in “The Smelter,” and the book slipped from her nerveless hand as she reached out to receive the dispatch.
It came at the close of the short twilight of a day never to be forgotten. She was sitting in the _portal_ to catch the last rays on the printed page, for her eyes are not so young as they once were, and in this land there is brief margin time of silver gray sky and drowsing earth. There trotted along the sheep paths and through the cramped and crooked streets a _burro_ with all the speed a _burro_ can make, goaded forward by a stick sharpened to that end. Mounted on him without bridle, saddle, whip or spur, was a boy recognized as a sort of messenger in the camp of the Mist-Befringed Mountains,--a boy beautiful as a princess’ page, with real Murillo head and luminous oriental eyes beaming with steady light in the olive face. There was exceptional grace in the movement of his limbs as he dismounted; his voice is always sad, and the soft “_Buenos dias Señora_,” conveyed no hint whether the bearer brought tidings good or ill. Bareheaded, he yet contrived to make the courtly Spanish bow, shook back his jetty locks, and bending low delivered the letter. The boy’s lovely name is Rafael Antonina Molino, and the dispatch was a leaf torn from a scratch-book, scrawled in haste with a hand that evidently trembled in the writing. It ran:
Near Las Lunas.
At last! About noon yesterday the digger in “The Fair Ophelia” struck soft carbonates genuine Leadville carbonates, and are now down four feet. They show up better and better.
Your own Jason.
P. S.--Send me a white shirt. I am to speak at the ratification meeting to-night.
A thrilling pause--a scream, a bursting shower of tears, kisses, embraces, a confusion of tongues in which the word “carbonate” was the only one common to all. Such a sunshiny storm is possible only to nervous women intensely wrought. In the _Mêlée_ a natty little jacket, brought by mail from Altman’s and almost as good as new, was absolutely ripped to pieces. When mines are _en bonanza_ (free translation, “booming”) who cares for New York jackets?
I shrink from the attempt to picture what Carlyle might call the resplendent weeks which followed, while a test ton of ore was sent to Silver City for reduction. Still less can I venture to touch the forlorn portrait of the judicious friend who advised selling out. He repented in sack cloth and alkali dust, and meekly apologized three times a day and again at bed time. So vanquished, he kept close in his earth works and hardly took courage to share the general joy. They are living yet who believe there was a dash of sarcasm in the withered smile with which he modestly used to inquire after the wealth of Denmark’s daughter. Through the resplendent weeks (I love that exquisite word) the spectres scarcely lost sight of each other, and they were very pallid. They mooned about like young lovers in a trance, and like them saw with eyes anointed. A glory rested on our dull earth, tinging it with rose-bloom and amethyst, as the wintry moon, looking through pictured windows, warmed the snowy breast of Madeline, utterly _tête montée_, a riotous prodigality possessed them. Their bank account was a sight to see, and under the sweet influence of the Pleiads the poor rejoiced and beggars thrived.
In happy nights, too sweet for sleep, they gathered lilies of Damascus and drank from springs shaded by plumy palms of Judea. They painted birds, long legged birds on panels, and sets of china containing a thousand pieces each. Ever they whispered, murmured, dreamed. Soon as the delirium passed and the fever cooled they resolved to flee “the finest climate in the world,” beloved of reporters, which every one rushes away from as soon as he has the money to go.
Take care! Take care! These are the shores of doom. Among other curious formations in the adamantine Foothills of the Mountains of the Moon are the Lodestone Rocks. Swiftly, swiftly, the ship was drawn to them. The gilded argosy with its precious freightage, swelling sail and triumphant banner went to pieces. Rosebloom and violet faded into the light of common day. The poor headboards beside the open graves are the last of the wreck, marking the spot where hopes rose so brightly they appeared sure prophesies unrolled.
[Dear reader, on whom I lean in tender confidence, forgive this secret tear over the lifeless clay of “The Fair Ophelia.” I sat by its cradle, I followed its hearse.]
The judicious friend ventures abroad now. He smiles shrewdly and the mourners dream no more. They see with cleared vision, and will take one of the many roads which lead to the Golden Milestone, and their dreams will all come true when galena sells for a dollar an ounce.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] I need hardly tell my reader the words “_Quien Sabe?_”--“Who knows?”--are the unanswerable answer forever on the Spanish-speaking tongue.