AWN, coming up beyond the Pecos, shone fairly on the wall of the range, turning the bare stone rosy, tingeing the trees bronze, bathing the plain in a vermillion wash, gilding the silver sage and lacy mesquite, touching the lonely, savage landscape with mystery. But the cleft of Doom Cañon showed dark and forbidding as a dead man's wound, a purple-black gash in the first tier of the cliffs that mounted in a broken mesa high against the sky.
Sheer were the walls of the cañon, seamed and pitted and worn but unscalable from the floor of the gorge where the sun never rested, or from the weather-bitten, eroded rims that leaned toward each other. North and south ran Doom Cañon, with twisting turns here and there, a corridor of grimness, of almost legendary horror.
Here, so runs the story, the fierce Apaches herded the more peaceful mesa dwellers, penning them for slaughter, leaving them scalped and mutilated, to furnish food for the sneaking coyotes and the greedy buzzards. Long years afterward prospectors, seeking gold, ventured into the gloomy recesses, climbing the masses of lava that blocked the entrance so that one seemed to descend into the gorge, and found a rushing, mysterious stream that gushed out of a cavern at the end of the great ravine, boiled along its length and, roaring and white with foam, rushed beneath the lava and disappeared again.
Esqueleto Creek they called it, for its banks were strewn with moldering, scattered teeth-gnawed skeletons. They brought no gold from Doom Cañon—they did not search for any—but emerged on to the plain, glad to be in the light and warmth of day again. Twice a day the sun bathes a part of each great wall, that is stained in fantastic hues with mineral solutions, that drips with oozing water and is patterned with lichens and weird fungus growths that look like cabalistic messages inscribed upon the cliffs. The stars shine down and are sometimes caught in glittering points upon the stream that comes boiling and roaring out of the resounding cavern and hurls itself darkly under the entrance ledges, but its inky, snaky coils never greet the warm kiss of the sun or the colder caress of the moon. It might be the Styx itself, and the cañon the lower court to Hades, or the fabled sacred river of Kublai Khan that ran:
No Indian ever entered there or came near the place. Even the reckless Apache, wandering from his reservation with his hand against that of all men, responsible for the massacre that named the gorge as the place of doom, gave it a wide berth.
It was marked for tragedy, a hall of death that Nature herself proclaimed taboo. Towering above Doom Cañon, boldly carved from the main mass of the great mesa by the wind, the rain, the frost and snow, stood Skull Knob, a semidetached bulk of white limestone. There were cavities in it where bushes grew and there was a ledge with stunted piñon and cedar upon it that gave to it eye sockets, nose and grinning jaws, even when the sun flared directly upon it.
And, always over the cañon, where surely few living things must stir or live, the buzzards hovered as if in memory of the great feast that was, perhaps, well within the recollection of those same ill-omened birds that, hour by hour, kept vigil, planing against the air currents in unceasing and apparently, profitless patrol.
Here was a desolate land where as yet the law had not come, a wild land where the renegades of three nations, the red man, the brown and the white, prowled and robbed and harried the hardy pioneers and prospectors who adventured in the half-desert region lying between the Rio Grande and the Pecos, carrying on a lawless traffic across the border. Doom Cañon, and its mesa formed part of the Organ Mountains in the Three Corners where Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico meet. It was a land of mirage and cactus, of yucca, greasewood and sage, of the puma, coyote, wolf and bear, of the tarantula, the Gila monster and the rattlesnake, the buzzard and the crow. It was a land of mirage and underground rivers, of the marvelous Seven Lost Cities of Cibola, of silver and gold, of thirst and torture, of hope and despair and death.