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Show • TWENTY-TWO MILES. 93 rocks. Still going up, I find the canon narrowing very much, being but fifteen or twenty feet wide; yet the walls rise on either side many hundreds of feet, perhaps thousands; I can hardly tell. In some places the stream has not excavated its channel down vertically through tho rocks, but has cut obliquely, so that one wall overhangs the other. In other places it is cut vertically above and obliquely below, or obliquely above and vertically below, so that it is impossible to see out overhead. But I can go no farther. The time which I estimated it would take to make the portage has almost expired, and I start back on a round trot, wading in the creek where I must, and plunging through basins, and find the men waiting for me, and away we go on the river. Just after dinner we pass a stream on the right, which leaps into tho Colorado by a direct fall of more than a hunch·ed feet, forming a beautiful cascade. There is a bed of very hard rock above, thirty or forty feet in thickness, and much softer beds below. The hard beds above project many yards beyond the softer, which are washed out, forming a deep cave behind the fall, and the stream pours through a narrow crevice above into a deep pool below. Around on the rocks, in the cave like chamber, are set beautiful ferns, with delicate fronds and enameled stalks. The little frondlets have their points turned down, to form spore cases. It has very much tho appearance of the Maiden's II air fern, but is much larger. rrhis delicate foliago covers the rocks all about the fountain, and gives the chamber great beauty. But we have little time to spend in admiration, so on we go. We make fine progress this afternoon, carried along by a swift rivel", and shoot over the rapids, finding no serious obstructions. The canon walls, for two thousand five hundred or three thousand feet, are very regular, rising almost perpendicularly, but here and there set with narrow steps, and occasionally we can see away above the broad terrace, to distant cliffs. We camp to night in a marble cave, and find, on looking at our reck-oning, we have run twenty two miles . .August 24.-The canon is wider to dp.y. The walls rise to a vertical height of nearly three thousand feet. In many places the river runs under a cliff, in great cw·ves, forming amphitheatre~, half dome shaped. , |
