There were turns-in where a continuance straight ahead would require an airship or a coroner; again turns-out where the direct line would telescope you against the state of California. These we could make out by straining our eyes. The horses plunged and snorted; the buckboard leaped. Fire flashed from the impact of steel against rock, momentarily blinding us to what we should see. Always we descended into the velvet blackness of the abyss, the cañon walls rising steadily above us shutting out even the dim illumination of the stars. From time to time our driver, desperately scared, jerked out cheering bits of information.
"My eyes ain't what they was. For the Lord's sake keep a-lookin', boys."
"That nigh hoss is deef. There don't seem to be no use saying WHOA to her."
"Them brakes don't hold fer sour peanuts. I been figgerin' on tackin' on a new shoe for a week."
"I never was over this road but onct, and then I was headed th' other way. I was driving of a corpse."
Then, after two hours of it, BING! BANG! SMASH! our tongue collided with a sheer black wall, no blacker than the atmosphere before it. The trail here took a sharp V turn to the left. We had left the face of the precipice and henceforward would descend the bed of the cañon. Fortunately our collision had done damage to nothing but our nerves, so we proceeded to do so.
The walls of the crevice rose thousands of feet above us. They seemed to close together, like the sides of a tent, to leave only a narrow pale lucent strip of sky. The trail was quite invisible, and even the sense of its existence was lost when we traversed groves of trees. One of us had to run ahead of the horses, determining its general direction, locating the sharper turns. The rest depended on the instinct of the horses and pure luck.
It was pleasant in the cool of night thus to run down through the blackness, shouting aloud to guide our followers, swinging to the slope, bathed to the soul in mysteries of which we had no time to take cognizance.
By and by we saw a little spark far ahead of us like a star. The smell of fresh wood smoke and stale damp fire came to our nostrils. We gained the star and found it to be a log smouldering; and up the hill other stars red as blood. So we knew that we had crossed the zone of an almost extinct forest fire, and looked on the scattered camp-fires of an army of destruction.