Читать книгу The Big Dry - George Garland - Страница 4

BETWEEN the Gila and San Francisco Rivers in southeastern New Mexico, the road drops suddenly off Cactus Flat in a maze of hairpin curves. Away to the east the mountains begin with a huge saddle hump that slopes to a horn, reminding one of a charging rhinoceros. It is the western jaw of a canyon’s mouth. The long eastern jaw reaches farther out, sheer and colorful, seeming to stare back at the road like the patient eye of Time.

It is the Big Dry.

Who named it that nobody seems to know. A poet, perhaps, one with a healthy sense of reality, for the brutal opening stands there a monument to drought. It has seen water rushing down, melted snow from the peaks of the Mogollons, in a wasteful gift, unfriendly and mocking. It has witnessed the push of white men up to the fertile San Francisco Valley, to the gold mines, the return of ore-laden bullwagons, showers of arrows on covered wagons and stagecoaches, and the ambush of United States troopers by the Apache—and all on this road.

The picture, from the flat or “Soldiers’ Hill,” is the same now as in the day of the famous Apache chieftain Victorio, renegade or great warrior, but certainly a strategist, who fashioned a part of the true history of this land ahead of his pupil, Geronimo.

This setting, made to order for the Apache, seems next to perfect for an historical novel of the West. The writer takes the liberty of drawing upon his imagination in dealing with Victorio and his son-in-law, Terribio, and in weaving them into a purely fictional tale that ends under the forbidding gaze of the Big Dry.