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Here the Indian waited for them. He pointed down another long swell of naked stone to a narrow green split which was evidently different from all these curved pits and holes and abysses, for this one had straight walls and wound away out of sight. It was the head of a canyon. "Nonnezoshe Boco!" said the Indian. "Nas Ta Bega, go on!" replied Shefford.
Shefford asked himself a hundred times if it were possible, and his answer seemed to be in the low, sullen, muffled roar of the river. And as the morning wore on toward noon his dread deepened until all chance appeared hopeless. Already he had begun to have vague and unformed and disquieting ideas of the only avenue of escape left to return up Nonnezoshe Boco and that would be to enter a trap.
And as Wetherill picked out the course and the mustangs followed him I had all freedom to see and feel the beauty, color, wildness and changing character of Nonnezoshe Boco. My experiences in the desert did not count much in the trip down this strange, beautiful lost canyon. All canyons are not alike. This one did not widen, though the walls grew higher.
Nonnezoshe needed life, wild life, life of its millions of years and here stood the dark and silent Indian. Long afterward I walked there alone, to and fro, under the bridge. The moon had long since crossed the streak of star-fired blue above, and the canyon was black in shadow.
Here, one by one, the mustangs went lame and we had to walk. And we slipped and stumbled along over these loose, treacherous stones. The hours passed; the toil increased; the progress diminished; one of the mustangs failed and was left. And all the while the dimensions of Nonnezoshe Boco magnified and its character changed.
From underneath the Natural Bridge showed to advantage, and if not magnificent like the grand Nonnezoshe of Utah, it was at least striking and beautiful. It had a rounded ceiling colored gray, yellow, green, bronze, purple, white, making a crude and scalloped mosaic. Water dripped from it like a rain of heavy scattered drops.
"The Indian will turn the trick, I tell you. Take my hunch. It's nothing for me to drift down a swift river. I worked a ferry-boat once." Shefford, to whom flying straws would have seemed stable, caught the inflection of defiance and daring and hope of the Mormon's spirit. "What then after you meet us at the mouth of Nonnezoshe Boco?" he queried. "We'll all drift down to Lee's Ferry.
John Wetherill, one of the famous Wetherill brothers and trader at Kayenta, Arizona, is the man who discovered Nonnezoshe, which is probably the most beautiful and wonderful natural phenomenon in the world. Wetherill owes the credit to his wife, who, through her influence with the Indians finally after years succeeded in getting the secret of the great bridge.
He did not gaze backward for a last glance at Nonnezoshe; nor did Jane or Lassiter. Fay, however, checked Nack-yal at the rim of the descent and turned to look behind. Shefford contrasted her tremulous smile, her half-happy good-by to this place, with the white stillness of her face when she had bade farewell to Surprise Valley. Then she rode Nack-yal down into the gorge.
There was a spirit in the canyon, and whether or not it was what the Navajo embodied in the great Nonnezoshe, or the life of this present, or the death of the ages, or the nature so magnificently manifested in those silent, dreaming waiting walls the truth for Shefford was that this spirit was God. Life was eternal. Man's immortality lay in himself. Love of a woman was hope happiness.
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