Nora continued to stare at the snake, almost perfectly camouflaged by its surroundings. “I feel a little sick,” she said.
“Let me walk first.”
In no mood to argue, Nora stood by while Sloane went on ahead, gingerly picking her way through the broken cane, pausing every few steps to scrutinize her path.
She stopped suddenly. “There’s another one,” she pointed. The snake, disturbed, was swiftly gliding down a stalk ahead of them. It gave a sudden, chilling buzz before it disappeared into a tangle of brush.
“Too bad Bonarotti isn’t here,” said Sloane, moving ahead carefully. “He’d probably make a cassoulet out of them.” As she spoke, there was another buzz directly beneath her feet. She leapt backward with a shout, then gave the snake a wide berth.
A few more harrowing moments brought them to the far side of the canebrake. Here the mouth of the canyon opened before them, two scooped and polished stone walls about ten feet apart, with a bottom of smooth sand barely covered by slowly moving water.
“Jesus,” Nora said. “I’ve never seen so many rattlers in one place in my life.”
“Probably washed down by a flood,” said Sloane. “Now they’re wet, cold, and pissed.”
They continued down the creek into the slot canyon, splashing in the shallow water. The narrow walls quickly pressed in around them, leaving Nora with the uncomfortable feeling that she was along the bottom of a long, slender container. Eons of floods had sculpted the walls of the canyon into glossy hollows, ribs, pockets, and tubes. There were only occasional glimpses of sky, and they proceeded in a reddish half-light that filtered down from far above. With the high narrow walls of the slot canyon crowding out the sun, the air at its base felt surprisingly chilly. In places where water had scooped out a larger hollow, they encountered pools of loose quicksand. The best way to get past them, Nora found, was to start crawling through on her hands and knees and, when the quicksand at last gave way, to lie on her stomach and breaststroke, keeping her legs rigid and unmoving behind her. The pack, oddly enough, buoyed her, acting as a kind of float on her back.
“It’s going to be a wet night,” Sloane said, emerging from one of the pools.
As the canyon descended, the light grew dimmer. At one point, a huge cottonwood trunk, horribly scarred and mauled, had somehow become jammed in the canyon walls about twenty feet above their heads. Nearby, there was a narrow hollow in the rockface, above a small, stepped ledge.
“Must’ve been some storm that put that tree up there,” Sloane murmured, glancing upward at the trunk. “I’d sure hate to be caught in a flash flood in one of these canyons.”
“I’ve heard the first thing you feel is a rising wind,” Nora replied. “Then you hear a sound, echoing and distorted. Someone once told me it sounded almost like distant voices or applause. At that point, you get your butt out as fast as possible. If you’re still in the canyon by the time you hear the roar of water, it’s too late. You’re dead meat.”
Sloane broke out into her low, sultry laugh. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Now you’ll have me climbing the walls every time I feel a breeze.”
As they walked on, the canyon narrowed still further and sloped downward in a series of pools, each filled with chocolate-colored water. Sometimes the water was only an inch deep, covering shivery quicksand; other times, it was over their heads. Each pool was connected to the next by a pitched slot so narrow they had to squeeze through it sideways, holding their packs. Above their heads, large boulders had jammed between the canyon walls, creating an eerie brown twilight.
After half an hour’s struggle, they came to a pourover above an especially long, narrow pool. Beyond, Nora could make out a faint glow. Taking the lead, she eased down into the pool and swam across toward a small boulder, wedged between the walls about six feet above the ground. A thick curtain of weeds and roots trailed from it, through which came a sheen of sunlight.
Nora crawled under the boulder and paused at the shaggy curtain, wringing the water from her wet hair. “It’s like the entrance to something magical,” Sloane said as she approached. “But what?”
Nora glanced at her for a moment. Then, placing her arms together, she pushed through the dense tangle.
Although not strong, the light of the late afternoon sun beyond seemed dazzling after their journey through the cramped, twisting canyon. As her eyes adjusted, Nora could see a small valley open up below them. The stream tumbled down a defile and spread out into a sandy creek along the valley floor. There was a narrow floodplain, covered with pounded boulders, repeatedly raked by flash floods. Cottonwoods lined the banks of the floodplain, their massive trunks scarred and hung with old flood debris. The creek had cut down through a layer of rock in the center of the valley, creating benchlands on either side that were also dotted with cottonwoods, scrub oak, rabbitbrush, and wildflowers.
The valley had an intimate feeling: it was only about four hundred yards long by two hundred yards wide, a jeweled pocket in the red sandstone. The mellow sunlight fell upon a riot of color: blooming Apache plumes, Indian paintbrush, scarlet gilia. Puffy cumulus clouds, tinged with the afternoon light, drifted across the narrow patch of sky above the clifftops.
After the long dark crawl through the slot canyon, arriving at this beautiful valley was like stumbling upon a lost world. Everything about it—its intimate size, its high surrounding walls, its incredible remoteness, the tremendous difficulties involved in attaining it—filled Nora with the sensation of discovering a hidden paradise. As she looked around, enraptured, a breeze began to come up. As the trees rustled, cotton fell from their catkins and drifted in the lazy air like brilliant motes of trapped light.
After a moment Nora glanced over at Sloane. The woman had a look of intense, suppressed excitement on her face; the amber eyes seemed to blaze as they darted about, scanning first the canyon floor, then its walls.
Light as a cat, Sloane moved silently down the shallow stream to the canyon floor. Nora lagged behind for a moment. Mingled with her awe of the beauty was a fresh certainty: this was the valley her father had discovered. And with this certainty came another thought, awful in its suddenness. Was the place terrible as well as beautiful? Would she find her father’s remains somewhere down there on the canyon floor, or hidden among the ledges above?
But as quickly as it had come, the feeling dissipated. Somebody had found and mailed his letter. That in itself was a mystery, which gnawed at her constantly. But at least it meant that, wherever her father’s bones lay, they probably lay somewhere else, closer to civilization. Still, it was several moments before she followed Sloane to the flat sandy benchland, girded with rocks, well above the flash flood zone. A small grove of cottonwoods provided shade.
“How’s this for a campsite?” Sloane asked, dropping her pack.
“Couldn’t be more perfect,” Nora replied. She unshouldered her own pack, pulled out her soggy sleeping bag, shook it out, and draped it over a bush.
Then her eyes turned ineluctably back toward the towering cliffs that surrounded them on four sides. Pulling the waterproof binoculars from her pack, she began scanning the rock faces. The sandstone cliffs rose in steplike fashion from the canyon floor: sheer pitches, interrupted by benchlands of softer strata that had eroded back to form flat areas. Near the far end of the valley, a large rockfall had dropped a pitched tangle of house-sized boulders that lay in a precarious jumble against the cliff face. But the rockfall led up to nothing; and there was no sign in the valley of a trail, a ruin, anything.
She shook off the sudden cold feeling in her gut, reminding herself that if the ruined city was obvious, it would have been found. Any caves or alcoves formed in those benches above could not be seen from below. It was precisely the kind of spot favored by the Anasazi.
Her father, however,
Nora glanced around for Sloane. The woman had already abandoned her scrutiny of the walls and was walking along the base of the cliffs, peering intently at the ground.
Nora shoved her binoculars into her damp jeans and walked along the cutbanks and rock shelves above the stream, examining the soil profile for any cultural evidence. She knew they should be using the last of the light to build a fire and prepare dinner. But, like Sloane, she felt compelled to keep searching.
