CHAPTER XXII

Nophaie’s return to consciousness left him with fading memory of black hideous depths, where something inexplicable in him had overthrown demons.

He had expected that he would die, but now he knew he would live. Had he not welcomed death? A vast struggle had gone on within his physical being. Vaguely it seemed that he had been in terrible conflict with the devil over possession of his soul. Haunting brooding thought of this strange thing occupied his waking hours and lingered in his dreams.

The satisfaction of the Witherses and the joy of Marian at his quick strides toward recovery gave Nophaie a melancholy happiness. They loved him. They did not recognize any barrier between him and Benow di cleash. Was there really a barrier? What was it? He spent hours trying to grasp the dim facts of former convictions, vows, duties. They eluded him. They grew dimmer. Something had happened to his soul or else the plague had left his mind impaired.

Nophaie was up and around on the fourth day after the crisis of his illness. He avoided contact with the Indians, and indeed with his white friends also as much as that was possible without being discourteous. And they in turn appeared to understand and help him. Yet always while he sat in the warm sun of the May mornings or walked under the greening cottonwoods Marian’s eyes followed him. He felt them. And when he met her gaze at close hand there shone a beautiful glad light. It thrilled him, swelled his heart, yet he felt it to be a reckoning he must some time deal with.

In a few more days Nophaie’s vigor had returned enough to warrant his leaving Kaidab. So, at an opportune moment, when he was alone with Withers and his wife and Marian, he spoke out about his plan.

“John, will you give me a pack of grain and a little grub?”

“What for?” queried the trader, in quick surprise.

“I want to ride off alone–into the sage–and the canyons,” replied Nophaie, thoughtfully.

Marian left her seat beside the fire and came to him, quite pale, with wondering, darkening eyes.

“Nophaie, are you–strong enough?” she asked, fearfully.

“It will cure or kill me,” he replied, with a smile, and he took her hand.

“Reckon it’s not a bad idea,” agreed Withers, more to his wife than to the others. She was silent, which in her meant acquiescence. Then he turned to Nophaie. “You can have anything you want. When’ll you go? To-morrow? I’ll get your horse in or you can have one of mine.”

“Yes, I’ll go at sunrise, before Benow di cleash is up,” returned Nophaie.

“You’ll go off alone and stay alone?” queried the trader.

“Honest Injun,” replied Nophaie.

“Good. Reckon I don’t mind telling you I’m worried a little,” went on Withers, running his hand through his tousled hair. “Beeteia has begun to play hell with the Indians.”

“I knew that,” said Nophaie.

“Beeteia!” exclaimed Marian. “Isn’t that Gekin Yashi’s husband? The young chief I saw up–there?”

“That’s the Indian,” rejoined the trader.

“Beeteia has the best blood of the Nopahs,” interposed Mrs. Withers. “He comes from the first clan. He’s really a great chief.”

“Reckon that means more than I thought,” said her husband. “He’s inflaming the Indians against Morgan and Blucher. I hear he’s–developed into a wonderful orator–anyway he has never gotten over Gekin Yashi’s death. He is trying to get the Indians to rise against the whites. That’s not new by any means here on the reservation. It probably will fizzle out, as all the uprisings do. But it might not. I just don’t like Beeteia’s influence. Could he be stopped, Nophaie?”

“You would have to kill him,” replied Nophaie.

“Ahuh!–Well, all we can do is hope nothing will come of it,” returned the trader, rising.

Mrs. Withers followed her husband out, leaving Nophaie alone with Marian. She still stood by his chair, looking down on him.

“Nophaie, where will you go?” she asked.

“I’ll go to Naza.”

“So–far?” she ejaculated, with a little catch in her voice.

“It’s not far for me.”

“But why Naza–if it’s only loneliness–the sage and canyons you feel you need?” she went on, earnestly.

Nophaie released her hand and put his arm round her waist. He felt a little shock go over her and then a long tremble. The sweetness and meaning of her presence had never been more potent. There seemed a difference in their relation–he could not tell what. That was another thing he must learn. He felt weaker, less able to hurt her.

“Benow di cleash, I’m not sure, but I believe I’m going to Naza because it’s the greatest god of the Nopahs.”

“Oh–Nophaie!” she faltered. “Are you still tortured? You told me how all the Nopah gods failed you. Even Nothsis Ahn was only a gray cold mountain, without voice or soul for you.”

“Yes, I remember, Marian,” returned Nophaie. “But I don’t seem to be tortured or driven, as I was when I climbed the north slope of Nothsis Ahn. It’s something I can’t explain. I don’t even know that my desire to go is anything but physical. Yet I’m in strange mood. I want solitude. And somehow Naza calls. There’s light–perhaps strength for me in those silent canyons.”

“Oh, if you could only find peace!” murmured Marian.

Nophaie left Kaidab before sunrise and rode out across the desert in the gray melancholy dawn. The discordant bray of a burro was the only sound to break the silence.

From a rise of ground he turned in the saddle to look back at the trading post. A white object, fluttering from a dark window, caught his quick eye. Marian was waving good-by to him. The act was something he might have expected. Reining in his horse on the height of ground, he watched for a long significant moment, while conflicting emotions burdened his heart. He would answer her surely. The little white handkerchief fluttered more vigorously. She saw that he was watching her. Then he answered with the slow sweeping gesture of an Indian who was going far across the ranges, to a place that beckoned him and from which he would soon return. He saw her face gleam from the window and he imagined the light upon it. Wheeling his horse, he rode down the other side of the ridge, out of sight of the post, and forced consciousness of Marian out of his mind.

Nophaie’s mount was one of Withers’s best, a big strong mottled bay horse, easy-gaited and tireless. He did not appear to note the added weight of pack and blanket tied behind the saddle. Nophaie felt dizzy and insecure, sensations he attributed to his weakened condition. These would leave him, sooner or later, and for the time being he walked the horse. Once out of sight of fences and cattle he began gradually to relax, to change, to shuffle off old morbid thoughts and feelings as if they had been dead scales. This journey would be the most cardinally important one of all his life. He divined that, but did not know why. Would Naza prove to be a shrine? Then he surrendered to the longing to give himself wholly to sensorial perceptions.

A pink glow suffused the steely blue sky over the eastern ramparts, leagues to Nophaie’s right. Northward he could see the tip of a red butte rising above the yellow cedar-dotted ridges of rock. The song of a mocking- bird, the yelp of a coyote, the scurrying of a cottontail into the brush gave life to the desert scene. Nophaie smelled the wood-smoke from Indian hogans; he saw blanketed Nopahs watching him from a cedar ridge; he heard the wild piercing song of a shepherd moving away with his flock. He avoided the well- beaten trails, so that he would not meet any of his people. He meant not to exchange one word with a living soul while on this pilgrimage.

He crossed the deep wash, and climbing out of it, and up the wind- scalloped and rain-carved rocky slope beyond he reached a point where he might have looked down upon Kaidab, but he faced ahead, eyes keen to catch the first sight of the great valley of monuments.

Soon he espied, from tip down to base, a massive red butte, with columns like a pipe organ, standing out upon the desert from the main wall of the uplands. It was still far, but he hoped to camp there that night and renew acquaintance with the sweet sage slopes where as a boy he had shepherded the flocks of his father. Across his senses flashed a wondering query as to why he should long to see them now, when always since his return to the reservation he had avoided those vivid scenes of boyhood. He answered nothing; he refused to reflect.

It was as if he saw the desert with new eyes. All the old landmarks appeared magnified. The walls and pyramids that for hundreds of years had been invested with the spirits of his race seemed glorified in his sight, yet they were not idols or gods to kneel before and worship. Through them his senses grasped at a different meaning of beauty and nature, time and life.

Nophaie rode down into a wide yellow-walled canyon and out upon a green and sandy level, where the sun grew hot and the dust puffed up in whorls. The wide far-flung horizon was now lost, and he appeared encompassed by walls, sweeping and long, broken and irregular. For hours Nophaie rode on, aware of sun and wind, of the steady clip-clop of hoofs and the swing of the horse, of the open stretch of valley around him and the red and yellow walls that seemed to travel with him. At the far end of this stretch he climbed a low pass, where a colossal black shaft of rock speared the sky, and looked down into the Nopah valley of monuments where his people had lived and where he had been born. The spectacle held him for moments.

His destination for that day was the great pipe-organ mesa, now looming grandly ten miles farther on. It guarded the entrance to the sacred valley, where each separate monument was a god of the Nopahs. Fatigue and exhaustion wore upon Nophaie. But these were nothing. Only collapse or death itself could have halted him.

When he reached the magnificent mesa sunset was burning the walls and monuments with gold and rose. The desert floor was gray and near at hand, purple in the distance. Above the red barrier which he must climb on the morrow a glorious cloud pageant held his gaze as he leaned panting on his horse.

A thin stream of water wound shining down the sandy wash. The color of cloud and mesa flowed in it. Nophaie unsaddled the horse, fed him grain, and, hobbling him, turned him loose. Then he set about his own simple needs. Hunger was not in him, but he forced himself to eat. This hard journey that he was taking would soon restore his elemental instincts.

A soft gray twilight was creeping out from the red walls when Nophaie reached the spot where he had sat so many days as a boy, watching the sheep. It was a long ridge not far from the great butte. Grass and sage were thick there even as in his boyhood. The fragrance filled his nostrils, and memory, sad and sweet, flooded his mind. He found the flat red rock where he and his sister used to sit together. How long ago! She was dead. All his people were gone.

Nophaie gazed across the gray valley to a V-shaped crack in the south wall. The narrow ribbon-like stream shone winding out of this canyon. Up there, where the canyon boxed under close-looming cliffs, he had been born. Nophaie could remember when he was three years old.

“The Indian in me speaks,” he soliloquized. “It would have been better for me to have yielded to the plague. That hole in the wall was my home–this valley my playground. There are now no home, no kin, no play. The Indians’ deeds are done. His glory and dream are gone. His sun has set. Those of him who survive the disease and drink and poverty forced upon him must inevitably be absorbed by the race that has destroyed him. Red blood into the white! It means the white race will gain and the Indian vanish.... Nophaie is not yet thirty, yet he feels old. He is ruined, he is lost. There is nothing left. He too should vanish. This spot should be his grave. Under the sage!... Death, sleep, rest, peace!”

But Nophaie’s intelligence repudiated that Indian fatalism. It might be true to his instincts, but not to his mind. He was still young. The war had not destroyed him. The plague could not kill him. His body was tough as the desert cedar, his spirit as unquenchable as the light of the sun. Every day that he lived he could mitigate in some degree the misery of his race, if he chose. But his hatred–the hatred of Morgan and Blucher, of all the white men who had wronged the Indian–that was the cancer in his soul. Neither an instinctive Indian life, nor one governed by his white education, could be happy while that hate curdled his blood. Then flashed the uplifting thought that the love of Marian, given him with all the wondrous strength and generosity of a white woman’s heart, should overcome his hate, compensate for all his sufferings, and raise him to a state far above revenge or bitterness. She had paid him for all personal wrongs done him by her people.

But here Nophaie felt the ignominy of his bitterness. His love for Benow di cleash, her love for him, did not seem to have power over that hate. Something more was needed. And suddenly he knew this was the meaning of his strange quest–of his pilgrimage to Naza.

Long Nophaie reclined there in the gathering darkness. White stars peeped over the black ruins. The cold night wind rose and moaned through the sage. The flicker of his campfire shone against the black base of the mesa. From far across the valley came the faint bleat of lambs, sad, plaintive, significant of life on the lonely desert.

In the rosy, silent dawn, with the sunrise at his back, Nophaie rode into a dim and untrodden trail that climbed from the low country, up over the first red rampart, and on across a flat region of rocks and washes, up again and farther higher into the uplands of cedar, piñon and sage. Behind him the great shafts and monuments rose out of the lowlands, continuing to a level where Nophaie rode in the same red stratum. Often he turned to gaze back, to see them dark and majestic against the white clouds.

Nophaie gathered strength from these surroundings, and from the spicy tang on the cool wind, and the slow-gathering sense of his agonies, like the miles, fading back of him. It was not that he was coming into his own again– though the purple sage uplands and Nothsis Ahn would soon be in sight; rather it seemed that he would find something new, all-sufficient and soul- sustaining.

He rode up a bare slope of rock, a gradual mile in ascent, wavy and hummocky with ridges and hills, canyons and holes, yet always bare yellow rock. Then he turned a great corner of wall and lost the backward view. To the fore was cedared flat, mile on mile, red-rocked and green-patched, stretching away to another wall. Nophaie rode at a trot now, and entered this flat belt, to come at length to a deep canyon. It yawned below him, half a mile in depth, with ragged slopes too precipitous for any but an Indian trail. Nophaie walked, leading the horse. The descent into the dry hot canyon, under the ragged cliffs, and through the maze of great blocks of red rock, down into the region of colored clay and dusty wash, was attended by a mounting joy. The old physical urge, the instinct of muscle achievement, the fighting of unknown forces by endurances, revived in Nophaie. Climbing the opposite side was travail. From the rim another flat stretched out endlessly toward the mountain wall, now vivid in colors of red, yellow, and violet.

Nophaie arrived at its base in the gray of twilight, and made dry camp in a clump of cedars. He was getting away from the Indian reservation now. Little risk of meeting Indians from here on! Nophaie felt strange relief, that was almost shame. Was he running away from his race in more ways than one? Twenty- four hours and twice as many miles had removed him immeasurably from familiar scenes, from bound emotions. It began to be easier for him to hold long to the watching, listening, feeling, smelling perception that engendered happiness. If he could only abandon himself to that wholly! The night was cold, the wind mourned in the cedars, the coyotes howled.

Next morning Nophaie climbed the barefaced mountain wall that seemed insurmountable. It resembled a barrier of human passion. Spent, wet, and burning, he fell on the rim and panted. Ten days ago he had been abandoned by his tribe as a dead man! But his white friends had ministered unto him. His white sweetheart had prayed for his life. She had not confessed that; no one had told him, but he knew. He was alive. He was a man.

Nophaie labored to his feet and mounted the horse. Something ineffably sweet and precious went fleeting over him. He could not grasp it.

For miles he rode through cedar and sage upland. At noon the tremendous chasm of Nopah yawned in sight. It was wide and very deep, and marked by talus of many hues–clays of lilac, heliotrope, and mauve. There was no vegetation– only a barren abyss of erosion and decay. It opened into a colored gulf where all was dim, hazy, vast. Gazing down, Nophaie experienced a thrill of exultation. He would cross this canyon where few Nopahs had ever set foot.

The ordeal consumed the rest of that day. Nophaie lost himself in absorption of declivity and descent, of sliding slope, of weathered rock and dusty wash, of the heat of cliff and glare of red, of vivid green cottonwoods and shining surging stream, of sheer looming colossal wall, and of the crawl upwards like a lizard.

His reward was the rolling purple-saged, green- cedared plateau crowned by noble Nothsis Ahn. Crags of yellow, black belts of spruce, gleams of white snow–thus the Mountain of Light returned to Nophaie. It was the same. Only he had changed. How could wars of selfish men affect Nothsis Ahn? What was the trouble of Nophaie? As he gazed upward it flashed across him that there was really no trouble. But this idea seemed the calm, the strength, the soul of the mountain.

The sun was far down in the west. Nophaie chose an open patch of sage, backed by cedars, and here he made camp, with Nothsis Ahn looking down upon him.

Two days later Nophaie had crossed the uplands, traveled down under the north slope of the great mountain, down and down into the canyons.

It was summer down there. Hot, fragrant air moved lazily in gentle winds. Green trees and grass and flowers and silver scale bordered the narrow red- walled lanes. Indian paintbrush added its vermilion and magenta to the colorful scene. Down and down Nophaie rode, under the gleaming walls, through sunlight and shade, along and across the murmuring rock-strewn brooks, beside banks of amber moss and white lilies, and through thickets of green oak and cottonwood, down at last into the well- remembered and beloved place where he had lived so long in loneliness and solitude–his Canyon of Silent Walls.

Nophaie rested there that night and the next day. In this deep canyon where water and grass were abundant Nophaie’s horse profited by the stay. As for Nophaie, he strove valiantly to make the idle hours those of an Indian contented with natural things. Still he felt the swelling in him of a great wave of emotion. Something was about to burst within him, like the breaking of a dam. Yet he knew that with every moment he grew farther away from and above any passion similar to that of Beeteia’s. A power of the working of which he was conscious, seemed to be gradually taking possession of his soul.

Starting on his pilgrimage again at sunset, Nophaie rode all night, down Naza Boco, the canyon in the far depths of which hid the great Nopah god.

That ride seemed a vigil. Daylight would have robbed it of some strange spiritual essence. The shadows under the mounting walls now showed black and again silver. The star- fired stream of blue sky above narrowed between the black rims, farther and higher as he rode down and down into the silent bowels of the rock-ribbed earth. Every hour augmented the sense of something grand, all-sufficing, final, that awaited him at the end of his pilgrimage.

Dawn came with an almost imperceptible change from black to gray. Daylight followed slowly, reluctantly. It showed Nophaie the stupendously lofty walls of Naza Boco. Sunrise heralded its state by the red-gold crown on the rims. Gradually that gold crept down.

Nophaie rode round a rugged corner of wall to be halted by a shock.

Naza! The stone bridge–god of the Nopahs arched magnificently before him, gold against the deep-blue sky. He gazed spellbound for a long time, then rode on. At first it had seemed unreal. But grand as Naza towered there, it was only a red-stained, black-streaked, notched and cracked, seamed and scarred masterpiece of nature. Wind and rain, sand and water were the gods that had sculptured Naza. But for Nophaie the fact that his education enabled him to understand the working of these elements did not mitigate in his sight their infinite power.

He rode under the bridge, something that a Nopah had never done before him. The great walls did not crumble; the stream of blue sky did not darken; Nothsis Ahn, showing his black-and-white crown far above the notch of the canyon, did not thunder at Nophaie for what would have been a sacrilege for a Nopah. Nothing happened. The place was beautiful, lonely, silent, dry and fragrant, strangely grand.

Leisurely Nophaie unsaddled and unpacked in the shade of a cedar. Already the canyon was hot. The crystal amber water of the stream invited relief from thirst and heat.

Nophaie spent the long austere day watching the bridge from different angles, waiting for what was to happen to him.

Then came the slow setting of the sun, a strange thing here in the depths of the canyon. Nophaie watched the marvelous changing of colors, from the rainbow hues of the arch to the gold of the ramparts and the rosy glow on the snowy summit of Nothsis Ahn. Twilight lingered longer than in any other place Nophaie remembered. It was an hour full of beauty, and of a significance of something evermore about to be.

Darkness fell. The low murmur of the stream seemed to emphasize the lonesomeness. At long intervals owls mourned their melancholy refrain. Naza stood up dark and triumphant, silhouetted against the sky, crowned with silver stars. Nophaie saw the Dipper turned upside down. By night the bridge gained something spectral and mysterious. Night augmented its grandeur.

Nophaie did not sleep. He never closed his eyes. Every moment hastened what he now divined to be an illumination of his mind.

Toward dawn a faint green light shone on the walls facing the south. The moon was rising. After a while the gleam grew stronger. Soon the shadow of the bridge curved on the opposite wall, and under the arch shone a dim moonlight, weird and beautiful.

After twenty-four hours of vigil under this shrine Nophaie prayed. With all the passion of his extremity he recalled the prayers of the Nopahs, and spoke them aloud, standing erect, with face uplifted in the moonlight. His impulse had been mystic and uncontrollable. It came from the past, the dim memories of his childhood. It was the last dying flash of Indian mysticism and superstition. The honesty and yearning of it had no parallel in all the complex appeals of the past. But it left him cold. Despair chained his soul. Then that strangely loosed its icy clutch. He was free. He realized it.

Time ceased for Nophaie. Earth and life seemed to stand still. Would there ever be another dawn? How locked he was in the rock confines of the earth! At last he found a seat against a huge fragment of cliff and from here he gazed with renewed eyes. What was the secret of Naza? The name was only Indian, handed down from those remote progenitors of the Nopahs who came from the north. Was there any secret? The spirit abiding in that magnificent bridge was an investiture from the soul of man. The Indian mind was still struggling far back along the dim trails of the progress of civilization. Blank wall of black on one side, wall of moonlit marble on the other, gleaming pale, sheered to the wan-blue, star-fretted sky; and across the opaque space arched the spectral rock rainbow, magnified in its night shadows.

Nophaie saw it now as if blindness had fallen from his eyes–saw it in all its nakedness and strength, its appalling beauty, its terrific strangeness. But it had become a thing, physical, inanimate, static. It needed the tremendous sheer of walls to uphold that massive arch. Beauty upheld by stark stone! Sublimity carved by the chisels of wind and water! Elemental toil of ages! A monument to the spirit of nature! But it could not endure.

Naza! The Nopah God! Bridge of sandstone! It was there. How grand the walls it joined! Those walls had been cut by the flowing of water, by the blowing of wind. Thousands of millions of tons of sand had eroded away–to leave Naza arched so magnificently there, as if imperishable. But it was not imperishable. It was doomed. It must fall or wear away. All that exceeding beauty of line and color, that vastness of bulk, must in time pass away in tiny grains of sand, flowing down the murmuring stream.

Then to Nophaie came the secret of its great spell.

Not all beauty or grandeur or mystery or immensity! These were only a part of its enchantment. For Nophaie it spelled freedom. Its isolation and loneliness and solitude meant for him the uttermost peace. There dawned upon Nophaie the glory of nature. Just so long as he could stay there he would be free, all- satisfied. Even sorrow was sweet. Memory of his white sweetheart was exalting.

The world of man, race against race, the world of men and women, of strife and greed, of hate and lust, of injustice and sordidness, the materialism of the Great War and its horrible aftermath, the rush and fever and ferocity of the modern day with its jazz and license and drink and blindness– with its paganism,–these were not here in the grand shadow of Naza. No sharp wolfish faces of men limned against this silence! No beautiful painted faces of women! No picture of the Indian tribes, driven from the green pastures and running water of their forefathers, herded into the waste places of the earth! The white man had not yet made Naza an object of his destructiveness. Nothing of the diseased in mind and body, the distorted images of mankind, the incomprehensible stupidity, the stony indifference to nature and beauty and ideals and good–nothing of these here in this moon-blanched canyon.

For the period of its endurance Naza would stand there, under its gleaming silent walls, with its rainbow hues and purple shadows at sunset, its golden glows and rosy veils at sunrise. The solemn days would pass and the dreamful nights. Peace and silence would reign. Loveliness would vie with austerity.

As the sun cleared away the shadows of night, so the spell of Naza clarified Nophaie’s mind of Indian superstition, of doubt and morbid fear. The tragic fate of the vanishing American, as he had nursed it to his sore heart, ceased to exist.

For Nophaie the still, sweet air of that canyon was charged. In this deserted, haunted hall of the earth, peace, faith, resurging life all came simply to him. The intimation of immortality–the imminence of God! That strife of soul, so long a struggle between the Indian superstitions of his youth and the white teachings forced upon him, ended forever in his realization of the Universal God of Indian and white man.