“I am so very completely and totally an idiot,” she said softly.
Anna had ducked into the tent to get her boating shoes. If she heard Jenny’s brief autobiography she gave no sign.
Beyond the grotto, the long skinny finger of lake snaking its way along the bottom of Panther Canyon narrowed precipitously. The gunwales of Jenny’s boat were scarcely a foot from the eighty-foot-high cliffs forming the sides of the slot canyon. Running at idle, she nosed the boat forward until both sides of the Almar’s bow touched the sandstone, then scraped, then the boat stuck like a cork in a bottle. Having shut down the engines, Jenny joined Anna where she knelt on the bow looking, to Jenny’s eye, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fairies.
Three feet from where the bow was wedged, giant stone steps, with an almost man-made symmetry, rose thirty feet above the lake level. Like a calving glacier, great rectangles of rock had sheared from the sides of the slot and fallen in a neat pile, completely blocking the canyon. To either side of the giant’s staircase another sixty feet of cliff cut upward before the earth gave way to the ribbon of sky. With the sun gone from them, and the sky turning pearl, the rock appeared dove gray and soft as velvet. The water ran dark, a blue that is only the blink of an eye from black.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” she asked when Anna didn’t speak.
Anna was shaking her head. The end of her long braid twitched across the back of Jenny’s hand. She stifled the urge to catch it as she might a cat’s tail.
“It’s too steep. It’s too high. Nobody could get out.” Anna’s voice, usually an alto, smooth as warm honey, had risen an octave and was all sharps and flats. Her eyes were too wide. Around the dark hazel irises Jenny could see white.
As a gift to her beloved, Jenny had effectively put the poor thing back into the jar. “Oh, honey,” she cried. “I am so sorry. I should have known. I’m such a blockhead. Come on. Let’s go back to camp, forget we ever came here.”
Anna didn’t move. She was shaking her head again.
“No,” she said, her voice still unnaturally high. “I can stay. I will stay. This is just a crack full of water. It won’t slam shut.”
Anna’s last word finished on a high note. Not quite a question, but clearly a plea for reassurance.
“The walls will not slam shut,” Jenny said firmly and waited as Anna breathed slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth. Meditation, Jenny knew from her years of shrinkage. Three breaths and Anna said, “Tell me how they could have gotten to the plateau from here.”
“Not here,” Jenny said. “Past this pile of sandstone.”
“What happens past the rocks?”
“The slot starts to get seriously narrow.”
Anna groaned. “You’re kidding?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jenny said. Then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “It’s really beautiful.”
“In a strangled creepy kind of way?” Anna asked. She was using humor to cover her fear. Jenny admired that and laughed to reward her courage.
“Coming here wasn’t that great an idea. Let’s go back and finish off the wine. Besides, wait till you see what I brought for supper.” She laid her hand on Anna’s arm. The gesture had been meant to reassure but it had sent a jolt of pure lust right up the center of Jenny. Pure and chaste from afar
Staring at the immense steps rising out of the lake, Anna hadn’t noticed Jenny’s brief internal battle between good and evil.
“I don’t see how anybody could possibly climb out of here without those things climbers nail into the walls and the ropes and pulleys or whatever they use,” Anna said.
Focus had taken the glaze from Anna’s eyes and the edge from her voice. Seeing her somewhat recovered, Jenny said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” The bow of the snub-nosed boat was sufficiently wedged—and this far from the washing-machine action of the main body of the lake, it wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Jenny jumped the yard of water between the boat and the sandstone stair and secured the bow line around a big friendly rock. Little was more embarrassing for a boat ranger than to lose her boat. Fortunately Jenny was an exceptionally strong swimmer. Both times she’d let her boat escape she’d been able to reclaim it without hopping pathetically around on shore begging kindly visitors to take their boat out and retrieve it for her.
“We’re set,” she said. “Feel free to disembark.”
Anna leaped gracefully onto the natural step. “Lay on, Macduff,” she said.
Jenny started up the pile of stones, thirty feet an easy scramble, Anna was mastering the climb, but she was sweating and breathing hard. Jenny reminded herself to quit showing off and take it easier on her companion. Women as fragile as her darling didn’t belong between a rock and a hard place.
“You okay with this?” she asked solicitously. “I’m a tough old thing. I’m used to it.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Anna said grimly.
When Anna reached the summit, Jenny gestured toward the sculpted slot canyon beyond and said, “Tada! Beautiful in a strangled creepy kind of way.”
“My gosh,” Anna breathed, and Jenny was gratified. They stood ten yards above an ever-narrowing waterway that had been cut off from the larger part of Panther Canyon by the rock fall. At the base of the obstruction the waterway was twelve feet wide, an almost square pool surrounded by sheer cliffs rising perpendicularly sixty or eighty feet.
“It’s like a quarry,” Anna said. “Like the granite quarries near where I grew up, but in miniature. Molly used to dive in them. Seventy feet. Not me. Too scared.”
It looked not only like a quarry but like a square sandstone jar with water in the bottom. Short staccato sentences: Jenny guessed Anna was afraid longer ones would betray her fear. She opened her mouth to again offer to go back to camp, but knew she was doing it because she felt guilty. Anna would leave when she needed to. At present, she seemed to need to stay and endure.
“A quarry with a tail.” Jenny pointed to the far end of the rectangular pool where a crack opened in the cliffs and the water slipped into a dark and twisting channel. “Runoff carved that slot down from the plateau. Of course, there wasn’t a lake here for most of the millions of years of cutting. That’s what makes the slot canyons here unique. The lake inhabits them. Look how sinuous the walls are. Nowhere near straight up and down. Eons on eons of water carved that S shape into the plateau on its way down from Fiftymile Mountain to the Colorado River. I love the way the wall on your left curves away, like it’s shying from the other’s touch, then, up higher, see how it sways back till it almost meets the opposite wall? Now close as lovers, now falling back. They always look to me like they’re in the middle of a sensuous dance to music timed to a millennium beat,” Jenny finished. “When you’re in the slot you can’t see the sky because of the curves in the cliffs above you.”
“It reminds me of ribbon candy. The kind we used to get at Christmas,” Anna said, sounding determinedly cheerful.
Jenny added her own nonthreatening image, hoping it would help. “Or taffy the way they’d pull it at the county fair, the colors stretching and twisting all through it.” It also resembled the elongated cousin to the canted neck of Anna’s jar. “That’s it,” Jenny said. “The goddess’s own sculpture. Had enough?”
In answer, Anna started down the three giant steps to where the rock sheared off in an eight-foot drop to the water. “Does the slot eventually lead up to the plateau?” Anna asked. “Run uphill getting shallower and shallower and then there you are?”
“Nope.” Jenny joined her on the edge of the drop. “The slot stays between sixty and a hundred feet deep and, for the most part, no more than a few feet wide. Often less than that. It runs back into the sandstone another two hundred yards or so, then ends in a chimney that goes vertically up to the plateau. Or almost all the way up. The last fifteen feet or so you need a rope to traverse. It’s too wide to shimmy up and too smooth to free-climb.”
“Can you swim to the end?”
“No. The water’s still there, but sometimes the walls of the canyon are only six or eight inches apart. Great place to wedge a foot.”
“There must be a beautiful waterfall back there when it rains.”
“I suppose you could enjoy it for a minute or two before it killed you,” Jenny said. “Everything washes down. Traversing the last fifty yards of the slot is an obstacle course the Navy SEALs would appreciate, but it’s definitely
