The Bridge of the Gods

He advanced with outstretched arms. She motioned him back.

“It will make it harder,” she said.

For a moment she looked into his eyes, her own dark, dilated, full of love and sadness; for a moment all that was within him thrilled to the passionate, yearning tenderness of her gaze; then she turned and went away without a word.

He could not bear to see her go, and yet he knew it must end thus; he dared not follow her or call her back. But so intense was his desire for her to return, so vehemently did his life cry out after her, that for an instant it seemed to him he had called out, “Come back! come back!” The cry rose to his lips; but he set his teeth and held it back. They must part; was it not God’s will? The old pain at his heart returned, a faintness was on him, and he reeled to the ground.

Could it be that her spirit felt that unuttered cry, and that it brought her back? Be this as it may, while he was recovering from his deadly swoon he dimly felt her presence beside him, and the soft cool touch of her fingers on his brow. Then – or did he imagine it? – her lips, cold as those of the dead, touched his own. But when consciousness entirely returned, he was alone in the forest.

Blind, dizzy, staggering with weakness, he found his way to the camp. Suddenly, as he drew near it he felt the earth sway and move beneath him like a living thing. He caught hold of a tree to escape being thrown to the ground. There came an awful burst of flame from Mount Hood. Burning cinders and scoria lit up the eastern horizon like a fountain of fire. Then down from the great canyon of the Columbia, from the heart of the Cascade Range, broke a mighty thundering sound, as if half a mountain had fallen. Drowning for a moment the roar of the volcano, the deep echo rolled from crag to crag, from hill to hill. A wild chorus of outcries rang from the startled camp, – the fierce, wild cry of many tribes mad with fear yet breathing forth tremulous defiance, the cry of human dread mingling with the last echoes of that mysterious crash.

CHAPTER IX

QUESTIONING THE DEAD

Then he said: “Cold lips and breast without breath,Is there no voice, no language of death?”Edwin Arnold.

While Cecil was on his way that evening to seek Wallulah, a canoe with but a single occupant was dropping down the Columbia toward one of the many mimaluse, or death-islands, that are washed by its waters.

An Indian is always stealthy, but there was an almost more than Indian stealthiness about this canoe-man’s movements. Noiselessly, as the twilight deepened into darkness, the canoe glided out of a secluded cove not far from the camp; noiselessly the paddle dipped into the water, and the canoe passed like a shadow into the night.

On the rocky mimaluse island, some distance below the mouth of the Willamette, the Indian landed and drew his boat up on the beach. He looked around for a moment, glanced at the red glow that lit the far-off crest of Mount Hood, then turned and went up the pathway to the ancient burial hut.

Who was it that had dared to visit the island of the dead after dark? The bravest warriors were not capable of such temerity. Old men told how, away back in the past, some braves had ventured upon the island after nightfall, and had paid the awful forfeit. They were struck by unseen hands. Weapons that had lain for years beside the decaying corpses of forgotten warriors wounded them in the dark. Fleeing to their canoes in swiftest fear, they found the shadowy pursuit was swifter still, and were overtaken and struck down, while the whole island rung with mocking laughter. One only escaped, plunging all torn and bruised into the river and swimming to the farther shore. When he looked back, the island was covered with moving lights, and the shrill echo of fiendish mirth came to him across the water. His companions were never seen again. A little while afterward the dogs barked all night around his lodge, and in the morning he was found lying dead upon his couch, his face ghastly and drawn with fear, as if at some frightful apparition.

“He disturbed the mimaluse tillicums [dead people], and they came for him,” said the old medicine men, as they looked at him.

Since then, no one had been on the island except in the daytime. Little bands of mourners had brought hither the swathed bodies of their dead, laid them in the burial hut, lifted the wail over them, and left upon the first approach of evening.

Who, then, was this, – the first for generations to set foot on the mimaluse illahee after dark?

It could be but one, the only one among all the tribes who would have dared to come, and to come alone, – Multnomah, the war-chief, who knew not what it was to fear the living or the dead.

Startled by the outburst of the great smoking mountains, which always presaged woe to the Willamettes, perplexed by Tohomish’s mysterious hints of some impending calamity, weighed down by a dread presentiment, he came that night on a strange and superstitious errand.

On the upper part of the island, above reach of high water, the burial hut loomed dark and still in the moonlight as the chief approached it.

Some of the Willamettes, like the Chinooks, practised canoe burial, but the greater part laid their dead in huts, as did also the Klickitats and the Cascades.

The war-chief entered the hut. The rude boards that covered the roof were broken and decayed. The moonlight shone through many openings, lighting up the interior with a dim and ghostly radiance. There, swathed in crumbling cerements, ghastly in shrunken flesh and protruding bone, lay the dead of the line of Multnomah, – the chiefs of the blood royal who had ruled the Willamettes for many generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior’s bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child’s playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw’s skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh years before.

Near the door, and where the slanting moonbeams fell full upon it, was the last who had been borne to the death hut, the mother of Wallulah. Six years before Multnomah had brought her body, – brought it alone, with no eye to behold his grief; and since then no human tread had disturbed the royal burial-place.

He came now and looked down upon the body. It had been tightly swathed, fold upon fold, in some oriental fabric; and the wrappings, stiffened by time still showed what had once been a rare symmetry of form. The face was covered with a linen cloth, yellow now through age and fitting like a mask to the features. The chief knelt down and drew away the face-cloth. The countenance, though shrunken, was almost perfectly preserved. Indeed, so well preserved were many of the corpses the first white settlers found on these mimaluse islands as to cause at one time a belief that the Indians had some secret process of embalming their dead. There was no such process, however, – nothing save the antiseptic properties of the ocean breeze which daily fanned the burial islands of the lower Columbia.

Lovely indeed must the mother of Wallulah have been in her life. Withered as her features were, there was a delicate beauty in them still, – in the graceful brow, the regular profile, the exquisitely chiselled chin. Around the shoulders and the small shapely head her hair had grown in rich luxuriant masses.

The chief gazed long on the shrunken yet beautiful face. His iron features grew soft, as none but Wallulah had ever seen them grow. He touched gently the hair of his dead wife, and put it back from her brow with a wistful, caressing tenderness. He had never understood her; she had always been a mystery to him; the harsh savagery of his nature had never been able to enter into or comprehend the refined grace of hers; but he had loved her with all the fierce, tenacious, secretive power of his being, a power that neither time nor death could change. Now he spoke to her, his low tones sounding weird in that house of the dead, – a strange place for words of love.

“My woman, – mine yet, for death itself cannot take from Multnomah that which is his own; my bird that came from the sea and made its nest for a little while in the heart of Multnomah and then flew away and left it empty, – I have been hungry to see you, to touch your hair and look upon your face again. Now I am here, and it is sweet to be with you, but the heart of Multnomah listens to hear you speak.”

He still went on stroking her hair softly, reverently. It seemed the only caress of which he was capable, but it had in it a stern and mournful tenderness.

“Speak to me! The dead talk to the tomanowos men and the dreamers. You are mine; talk to me; I am in need. The shadow of something terrible to come is over the Willamette. The smoking mountains are angry; the dreamers see only bad signs; there are black things before Multnomah, and he cannot see what they are. Tell me, – the dead are wise and know that which comes, – what is this unknown evil which threatens me and mine?”

He looked down at her with intense craving, intense desire, as if his imperious will could reanimate that silent clay and force to the mute lips the words he so desired. But the still lips moved not, and the face lay cold under his burning and commanding gaze. The chief leaned closer over her; he called her name aloud, – something that the Willamette Indians rarely did, for they believed that if the names of the dead were spoken, even in conversation, it would bring them back; so they alluded to their lost ones only indirectly, and always reluctantly and with fear.

“Come back!” said he, repeating the name he had not spoken for six years. “You are my own, you are my woman. Hear me, speak to me, you whom I love; you who, living or dead, are still the wife of Multnomah.”

No expression flitted over the changeless calm of the face beneath him: no sound came back to his straining ears except the low intermittent roar of the far-off volcano.

A sorrowful look crossed his face. As has been said, there was an indefinable something always between them, which perhaps must ever be between those of diverse race. It had been the one mystery that puzzled him while she was living, and it seemed to glide, viewless yet impenetrable, between them now. He rose to his feet.

“It comes between us again,” he thought, looking down at her mournfully. “It pushed me back when she was living, and made me feel that I stood outside her heart even while my arms were around her. It comes between us now and will not let her speak. If it was only something I could see and grapple with!”

And the fierce warrior felt his blood kindle within him, that not only death but something still more mysterious and incomprehensible should separate him from the one he loved. He turned sadly away and passed on to the interior of the hut. As he gazed on the crumbling relics of humanity around him, the wonted look of command came back to his brow. These should obey; by iron strength of will and mystic charm he would sway them to his bidding. The withered lips of death, or spirit voices, should tell him what he wished to know. Abjectly superstitious as was the idea it involved, there was yet something grand in his savage despotic grasp after power that, dominating all he knew of earth, sought to bend to his will even the spirit-land.

The chief believed that the departed could talk to him if they would; for did they not talk to the medicine men and the dreamers? If so, why not to him, the great chief, the master of all the tribes of the Wauna?

He knelt down, and began to sway his body back and forth after the manner of the Nootka shamans, and to chant a long, low, monotonous song, in which the names of the dead who lay there were repeated over and over again.

“Kamyah, Tlesco, Che-aqah, come back! come back and tell me the secret, the black secret, the death secret, the woe that is to come. Winelah, Sic-mish, Tlaquatin, the land is dark with signs and omens; the hearts of men are heavy with dread; the dreamers say that the end is come for Multnomah and his race. Is it true? Come and tell me. I wait, I listen, I speak your names; come back, come back!”

Tohomish himself would not have dared to repeat those names in the charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known to the Indians.

Ever as Multnomah chanted, the sullen roar of the volcano came like an undertone and filled the pauses of the wild incantation. And as he went on, it seemed to the chief that the air grew thick with ghostly presences. There was a sense of breathing life all around him. He felt that others, many others, were with him; yet he saw nothing. When he paused for some voice, some whisper of reply, this sense of hyper-physical perception became so acute that he could almost see, almost hear, in the thick blackness and the silence; yet no answer came.

Again he resumed his mystic incantation, putting all the force of his nature into the effort, until it seemed that even those shadowy things of the night must yield to his blended entreaty and command. But there came no response. Thick and thronging the viewless presences seemed to gather, to look, and to listen; but no reply came to his ears, and no sight met his eyes save the swathed corpses and the white-gleaming bones on which the shifting moonbeams fell.

Multnomah rose to his feet, baffled, thwarted, all his soul glowing with anger that he should be so scorned.

“Why is this?” said his stern voice in the silence. “You come, but you give no reply; you look, you listen, but you make no sound. Answer me, you who know the future; tell me this secret!”

Still no response. Yet the air seemed full of dense, magnetic life, of muffled heart-beats, of voiceless, unresponsive, uncommunicative forms that he could almost touch.

For perhaps the first time in his life the war-chief found himself set at naught. His form grew erect; his eyes gleamed with the terrible wrath which the tribes dreaded as they dreaded the wrath of the Great Spirit.

“Do you mock Multnomah? Am I not war-chief of the Willamettes? Though you dwell in shadow and your bodies are dust, you are Willamettes, and I am still your chief. Give up your secret! If the Great Spirit has sealed your lips so that you cannot speak, give me a sign that will tell me. Answer by word or sign; I say it, – I, Multnomah, your chief and master.”

Silence again. The roar of the volcano had ceased; and an ominous stillness brooded over Nature, as if all things held their breath, anticipating some mighty and imminent catastrophe. Multnomah’s hands were clinched, and his strong face had on it now a fierceness of command that no eye had ever seen before. His indomitable will reached out to lay hold of those unseen presences and compel them to reply.

A moment of strained, commanding expectation: then the answer came; the sign was given. The earth shook beneath him till he staggered, almost fell; the hut creaked and swayed like a storm-driven wreck; and through the crevices on the side toward Mount Hood came a blinding burst of flame. Down from the great gap in the Cascade Range through which flows the Columbia rolled the far-off thundering crash which had so startled Cecil and appalled the tribes. Then, tenfold louder than before, came again the roar of the volcano.

Too well Multnomah knew what had gone down in that crash; too well did he read the sign that had been given. For a moment it seemed as if all the strength of his heart had broken with that which had fallen; then the proud dignity of his character reasserted itself, even in the face of doom.

“It has come at last, as the wise men of old said it would. The end is at hand; the Willamettes pass like a shadow from the earth. The Great Spirit has forsaken us, our tomanowos has failed us. But my own heart fails me not, and my own arm is strong. Like a war-chief will I meet that which is to come. Multnomah falls, but he falls as the Bridge has fallen, with a crash that will shake the earth, with a ruin that shall crush all beneath him even as he goes down.”

Turning away, his eyes fell on the body of his wife as he passed toward the door. Aroused and desperate as he was, he stopped an instant and looked down at her with a long, lingering look, a look that seemed to say, “I shall meet you ere many suns. Death and ruin but give you back to me the sooner. There will be nothing between us then; I shall understand you at last.”

Then he drew his robe close around him, and went out into the night.

BOOK V

THE SHADOW OF THE END

CHAPTER I

THE HAND OF THE GREAT SPIRIT

“We view as one who hath an evil sight,”He answered, “plainly objects far remote.”Carey: Dante.

The night came to an end at last, – a night not soon forgotten by the Oregon Indians, and destined to be remembered in tale and tomanowos lore long after that generation had passed away. The sky was thick with clouds; the atmosphere was heavy with smoke, which, dense and low-hanging in the still weather, shut out the entire horizon. The volcano was invisible in the smoky air, but its low mutterings came to them from time to time.

The chiefs met early in the grove of council. Multnomah’s countenance told nothing of the night before, but almost all the rest showed something yet of superstitious fear. Mishlah’s face was haggard, his air startled and uneasy, like that of some forest animal that had been terribly frightened; and even Snoqualmie looked worn. But the greatest change of all was in Tohomish. His face was as ghastly as that of a corpse, and he came into the council walking in a dull lifeless way, as if hardly aware of what he was doing. Those nearest to him shrank away, whispering to one another that the seer looked like a dead man.

Cecil came last. The severe mental conflict of the past night had told almost fatally on a frame already worn out by years of toil and sickness. His cheek was pale, his eye hollow, his step slow and faltering like one whose flame of life is burning very low. The pain at his heart, always worse in times of exhaustion, was sharp and piercing.

He looked agitated and restless; he had tried hard to give Wallulah into the hands of God and feel that she was safe, but he could not. For himself he had no thought; but his whole soul was wrung with pain for her. By virtue of his own keen sympathies, he anticipated and felt all that the years had in store for her, – the loneliness, the heartache, the trying to care for one she loathed; until he shrank from her desolate and hopeless future as if it had been his own. All his soul went out to her in yearning tenderness, in passionate desire to shield her and to take away her burden.

But his resolution never wavered. Below the ebb and flow of feeling, the decision to make their separation final was as unchanging as granite. He could not bear to look upon her face again; he could not bear to see her wedded to Snoqualmie. He intended to make one last appeal to the Indians this morning to accept the gospel of peace; then he would leave the council before Wallulah was brought to it. So he sat there now, waiting for the “talk” to begin.

The bands gathered around the grove were smaller than usual. Many had fled from the valley at dawn to escape from the dreaded vicinity of the smoking mountains; many hundreds remained, but they were awed and frightened. No war could have appalled them as they were appalled by the shaking of the solid earth under their feet. All the abject, superstition of their natures was roused. They looked like men who felt themselves caught in the grasp of some supernatural power.

Multnomah opened the council by saying that two runners had arrived with news that morning; the one from the sea-coast, the other from up the Columbia. They would come before the council and tell the news they had brought.

The runner from the upper Columbia spoke first. He had come thirty miles since dawn. He seemed unnerved and fearful, like one about to announce some unheard-of calamity. The most stoical bent forward eagerly to hear.

“The Great Spirit has shaken the earth, and the Bridge of the Gods has fallen!”

There was the silence of amazement; then through the tribes passed in many tongues the wild and wondering murmur, “The Bridge of the Gods has fallen! The Bridge of the Gods has fallen!” With it, too, went the recollection of the ancient prophecy that when the Bridge fell the power of the Willamettes would also fall. Now the Bridge was broken, and the dominion of the Willamettes was broken forever with it. At another time the slumbering jealousy of the tribes would have burst forth in terrific vengeance on the doomed race. But they were dejected and afraid. In the fall of the Bridge they saw the hand of the Great Spirit, a visitation of God. And so Willamette and tributary alike heard the news with fear and apprehension. Only Multnomah, who knew the message before it was spoken, listened with his wonted composure.

“It is well,” he said, with more than Indian duplicity; “the daughter of Multnomah is to become the wife of Snoqualmie the Cayuse, and the new line that commences with their children will give new chiefs to head the confederacy of the Wauna. The old gives way to the new. That is the sign that the Great Spirit gives in the fall of the Bridge. Think you it means that the war-strength is gone from us, that we shall no longer prevail in battle? No, no! who thinks it?”

The proud old sachem rose to his feet; his giant form towered over the multitude, and every eye fell before the haughty and scornful glance that swept council and audience like a challenge to battle.

“Is there a chief here that thinks it? Let him step out, let him grapple with Multnomah in the death-grapple, and see. Is there a tribe that thinks it? We reach out our arms to them; we are ready. Let them meet us in battle now, to-day, and know if our hearts have become the hearts of women. Will you come? We will give you dark and bloody proof that our tomahawks are still sharp and our arms are strong.”

He stood with outstretched arms, from which the robe of fur had fallen back. A thrill of dread went through the assembly at the grim defiance; then Snoqualmie spoke.

“The heart of all the tribes is as the heart of Multnomah. Let there be peace.”

The chief resumed his seat. His force of will had wrung one last victory from fate itself. Instantly, and with consummate address, Multnomah preoccupied the attention of the council before anything could be said or done to impair the effect of his challenge. He bade the other runner, the one from the sea-coast, deliver his message.

It was, in effect, this: —

A large canoe, with great white wings like a bird, had come gliding over the waters to the coast near the mouth of the Wauna. Whence it came no one could tell; but its crew were pale of skin like the great white shaman there in the council, and seemed of his race. Some of them came ashore in a small canoe to trade with the Indians, but trouble rose between them and there was a battle. The strangers slew many Indians with their magic, darting fire at them from long black tubes. Then they escaped to the great canoe, which spread its wings and passed away from sight into the sea. Many of the Indians were killed, but none of the pale-faced intruders. Now the band who had suffered demanded that the white man of whom they had heard – the white chief at the council – be put to death to pay the blood-debt.

All eyes turned on Cecil, and he felt that his hour was come. Weak, exhausted in body and mind, wearied almost to death, a sudden and awful peril was on him. For a moment his heart sank, his brain grew dizzy. How could he meet this emergency? All his soul went out to God with a dumb prayer for help, with an overwhelming sense of weakness. Then he heard Multnomah speaking to him in cold, hard tones.

“The white man has heard the words of the runner. What has he to say why his life should not pay the blood-debt?”

Cecil rose to his feet. With one last effort he put Wallulah, himself, his mission, into the hands of God; with one last effort he forced himself to speak.