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. I
crept 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. I
stepped 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.
Would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be
guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent Americans from
chipping the cones to pieces, or, worse still, making the geyser
sick? If you take a small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it
down a geyser's mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to
lay all before you, and for days afterward will be of an
irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I
wish that I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely
little beast far away in the woods. It sounds so probable and so
human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the
Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth; she looks like a
pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no
ornamentation about her. At irregular intervals she speaks and
sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet high to begin
with, then she is angry for a day and a half - sometimes for two
days.
Owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night, not many
people have seen the Giantess at her finest; but the clamor of
her unrest, men say, shakes the wooden hotel, and echoes like
thunder among the hills.
