第16章 IV(1)

The Yellowstone ONCE upon a time there was a carter who brought his team and a friend into the Yellowstone Park without due thought.Presently they came upon a few of the natural beauties of the place,and that carter turned his team into his friend's team,howling:--"Get out o'this,Jim.All hell's alight under our noses!"And they called the place Hell's Half-Acre to this day to witness if the carter lied.

We,too,the old lady from Chicago,her husband,Tom,and the good little mares,came to Hell's Half-Acre,which is about sixty acres in extent,and when Tom said:--"Would you like to drive over it?"We said:--"Certainly not,and if you do we shall report you to the park authorities."There was a plain,blistered,peeled,and abominable,and it was given over to the sportings and spoutings of devils who threw mud,and steam,and dirt at each other with whoops,and halloos,and bellowing curses.

The places smelled of the refuse of the pit,and that odor mixed with the clean,wholesome aroma of the pines in our nostrils throughout the day.

This Yellowstone Park is laid out like Ollendorf,in exercises of progressive difficulty.Hell's Half-Acre was a prelude to ten or twelve miles of geyser formation.

We passed hot streams boiling in the forest;saw whiffs of steam beyond these,and yet other whiffs breaking through the misty green hills in the far distance;we trampled on sulphur in crystals,and sniffed things much worse than any sulphur which is known to the upper world;and so journeying,bewildered with the novelty,came upon a really park-like place where Tom suggested we should get out and play with the geysers on foot.

Imagine mighty green fields splattered with lime-beds,all the flowers of the summer growing up to the very edge of the lime.

That was our first glimpse of the geyser basins.

The buggy had pulled up close to a rough,broken,blistered cone of spelter stuff between ten and twenty feet high.There was trouble in that place--moaning,splashing,gurgling,and the clank of machinery.A spurt of boiling water jumped into the air,and a wash of water followed.

I removed swiftly.The old lady from Chicago shrieked."What a wicked waste!"said her husband.

I think they call it the Riverside Geyser.Its spout was torn and ragged like the mouth of a gun when a shell has burst there.

It grumbled madly for a moment or two,and then was still.Icrept over the steaming lime--it was the burning marl on which Satan lay--and looked fearfully down its mouth.You should never look a gift geyser in the mouth.

I beheld a horrible,slippery,slimy funnel with water rising and falling ten feet at a time.Then the water rose to lip level with a rush,and an infernal bubbling troubled this Devil's Bethesda before the sullen heave of the crest of a wave lapped over the edge and made me run.

Mark the nature of the human soul!I had begun with awe,not to say terror,for this was my first experience of such things.Istepped back from the banks of the Riverside Geyser,saying:--"Pooh!Is that all it can do?"Yet for aught I knew,the whole thing might have blown up at a minute's notice,she,he,or it being an arrangement of uncertain temper.

We drifted on,up that miraculous valley.On either side of us were hills from a thousand or fifteen hundred feet high,wooded from crest to heel.As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the air,misshapen lumps of lime,mist-like preadamite monsters,still pools of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers,a river that coiled on itself twenty times,pointed bowlders of strange colors,and ridges of glaring,staring white.

A moon-faced trooper of German extraction--never was park so carefully patrolled--came up to inform us that as yet we had not seen any of the real geysers;that they were all a mile or so up the valley,and tastefully scattered round the hotel in which we would rest for the night.

America is a free country,but the citizens look down on the soldier.I had to entertain that trooper.The old lady from Chicago would have none of him;so we loafed alone together,now across half-rotten pine logs sunk in swampy ground,anon over the ringing geyser formation,then pounding through river-sand or brushing knee-deep through long grass.

"And why did you enlist?"said I.

The moon-faced one's face began to work.I thought he would have a fit,but he told me a story instead--such a nice tale of a naughty little girl who wrote pretty love letters to two men at once.She was a simple village wife,but a wicked "family novelette"countess couldn't have accomplished her ends better.

She drove one man nearly wild with the pretty little treachery,and the other man abandoned her and came West to forget the trickery.

Moon-face was that man.

We rounded and limped over a low spur of hill,and came out upon a field of aching,snowy lime rolled in sheets,twisted into knots,riven with rents,and diamonds,and stars,stretching for more than half a mile in every direction.

On this place of despair lay most of the big,bad geysers who know when there is trouble in Krakatoa,who tell the pines when there is a cyclone on the Atlantic seaboard,and who are exhibited to visitors under pretty and fanciful names.

The first mound that I encountered belonged to a goblin who was splashing in his tub.

I heard him kick,pull a shower-bath on his shoulders,gasp,crack his joints,and rub himself down with a towel;then he let the water out of the bath,as a thoughtful man should,and it all sunk down out of sight till another goblin arrived.

So we looked and we wondered at the Beehive,whose mouth is built up exactly like a hive,at the Turban (which is not in the least like a turban),and at many,many other geysers,hot holes,and springs.Some of them rumbled,some hissed,some went off spasmodically,and others lay dead still in sheets of sapphire and beryl.