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Show FROM MOqUl TO THE COLORADO. 297 men with their butcher- knives had hacked out rude oars from drift-wood, and all were clamorous for me to cross at once. They could not understand why a Melicano, who professed to understand rowing, should hesitate. But I did not like to risk it. The very aspect of the place frightened me: the lofty walls inclosing a'cafion six or seven thousand feet deep; the rocky face, red and scarred as if blasted by angry lightnings; the bare sand- plain, and the swift river roaring against projecting rocks, all looked very different from the placid Wa-bash and Ohio, where I learned rowing. A mile above, the up-per and lower cliff appeared to run together, with an offset of but a rod or two, and there the sheer descent from the plateau to the river was at least six thousand feet almost perpendicular. I fixed my eye on pieces of drift- wood to measure the current ; it was a little more than twenty minutes from the time they came in sight above till they entered the rapids below. How could I hope to paddle across in less than twenty minutes ? It was 1 P. M., and we had the boat at our camp and two rude oars. I took my coffee and sardines, chewed mescal reflectively for half an hour, and then proposed to the boys that we make our blankets into horse- collars and lariats into gears, and haul the boat across the point. The bend above, I had noticed, would throw it offshore, and with the aid of an eddy put us half way across. They objected decidedly : the horses would kick each other, and forty other evils to their property would result. Ignorant as they were of that element, they much pre-ferred taking it by water. Their own lives and limbs they were ready to risk ; but, said Espanol, their horses were their wealth did I ask them to go home poor? They had evidently adopted the sound philosophy that life without some property is not worth caring for. So to the river we betook ourselves, though to me the case looked hopeless. The bank was so steep that it could only be descended once in two or three hundred feet, and overgrown thickly nearly all the way with willows and thorny bushes, often twenty feet out into the water. The rope could not be dragged over these ; it had to be passed outside of them, taking advantage of a bare point to haul in, rest and make a fresh start. The four young fellows stripped and took to the' water. I, in the same condition, sat astride the bow and shoved off shore. They would drag the boat to a convenient point, then take the rope in their mouths and pass themselves around the willows, holding by their hands with bodies in the water. A most ridiculous sight it would have been to one free from our solicitude : the naked barbarians plunging and scrambling in the river, the naked white |