Page:Bridge of the Gods (Balch).djvu/87

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d the pale,

sweet creature whose eyes looked at them with a deep, dumb woe they could not understand.

When she had become familiar with the Willamette tongue, she told them that she was the daughter of a chief far away across the great water, who ruled a country as broad as the land of the Wauna and far richer. He had sent her as a bride to the ruler of another land, with a fabulous dowry of jewels and a thousand gifts besides. But the ship that bore her and her splendid treasures had been turned from its course by a terrible storm. Day after day it was driven through a waste of blackness and foam, the sails rent, the masts swept away, the shattered hulk hurled onward like a straw by the fury of the wind. When the tempest had spent itself, they found them selves in a strange sea under strange stars. Compass and chart were gone; they knew not where they were, and caught in some unknown current, they could only drift blindly on and on. Never sighting land, seeing naught but the everlasting sweep of wave and sky, it began to be whispered in terror that this ocean had no further shore, that they might sail on forever, seeing nothing but the boundless waters. At length, when the superstitious sailors began to talk of throwing their fair charge overboard as an offering to the gods, the blue peaks of the Coast Range rose out of the water, and the ever rain-freshened green of the Oregon forests dawned upon them. Then came the attempt to enter the Columbia, and the wreck on the bar. 1

l Shipwrecks of Asiatic vessels are not uncommon on the Pacific Coast, several having occurred during the present century, notably that of a Japanese junk in 1833, from waich three passengers were