FullReads

The wall of the river canon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river. Winter and summer the volume of water never varies, and the rate of discharge is always the same, and the water is never cold, though I have just said it is. It looks cold until the rocks warm it with their gemlike tints, like a bride’s jewels gleaming through her veil. Back of the bluffs, where it might be supposed to come from, there is nothing for a hundred miles but drought and desert plains. I don’t care for any of their theories concerning its source. It is better as it is–the miracle of the smitten rock.

You can fancy what wild presumption it must seem that a mere man should think to reverse those torrents and make them climb the bluff or cram them into an iron pipe and send them like paid laborers to hoist and pump and grind, and light the streets at Silver City, a hundred miles away. And how the cataracts will shout while these two pigmies compare their rival claims to ownership–in a force that with one stroke could lay them as flat as last year’s leaves in the bottom of a mill-race!

The particular fall my schemer has located for his own–other claims to be discussed hereafter–is called the “Snow Bank.” He says he doesn’t want the earth: this one cataract is enough for him. To look at the whole frontage of the springs and listen to their roar, one would think there might be water enough for them both, poor children! Hardly what you’d call two bites of a cherry!

If the springs were the half of a broken diamond bracelet, the Snow Bank would be its brightest gem, lying separate in the case–perhaps the one that was the clasp. It is half hidden by the shoulder of a great barren bluff which, at a certain angle of the sun, throws a blue shadow over it. At other times the fall is almost too bright in its foaming whiteness for the eye to endure.

Kitty is painting it with this shadow half across it; but the light shines upon it at its source. Tom is doubtful if she is showing the fall to the best advantage for his purpose, but he is obliging enough to let the artist try it in her own way first.

“Go up there,” she says, “and stand at the head of the spring, if you want to show by comparison how big it is, or how small you are.”

He goes, and gets in position, and Kitty makes some pencil-marks on the margin of her sketch. Then she waves her hands to tell him, across the shouting current, that she is done with him. She has been so quick that he thinks he must have mistaken her gesture. Then Harshaw makes the train-conductor’s signal for the train to move on.

“You see,” she says to Harshaw and me, who are looking over her shoulder, ” that would be the size of him in my sketch.” She points to the marginal pencil-mark, which is not longer than the nib of a stub-pen. “I can’t make a little black dot like that look like a man.”

“In this particular sketch, for his purpose, he’d rather look like a dot than a man, I dare say,” said Harshaw.

“Well, shall I put him in? I can make a note of it on the margin: ‘This black dot is Mr. Daly, standing at the spring-head. He is six feet'”–