egs; no
one knows how deep, but not half the width which we see here.

"That's the worst water I ever saw myself--it runs so strong that
there is a big ridge thrown up in the middle of the river, many feet
higher than the water on either side. There is a crest of white water
all down the sides of the top of that high ridge. The water looks as
though it were hard, so that you couldn't drive a nail through it,
it's flung through there at such tremendous pressure.

"You don't have much time to look as you go through, and there is no
place where you can see the Giant Eddy except from the Giant Eddy
itself. All I can remember is that we were clawing to keep on top of
that high rib of the water mid-stream. I can see it now, that
place--with green water running up-stream on each side, and the ridge
of white water in the middle, and the long bent slope, like a
show-case glass, running on each side from us to the edges of the
up-stream currents. It was a very wonderful and terrible sight, and
seeing it once was quite enough for me.

"About half-way down that long, bad chute I saw a hole open up in the
crown of that ridge and could look down into it, it seemed to me,
fifteen feet--some freak in the current made it--no one can tell what.
It seemed to chase us on down, and all our men paddled like mad. If
our stern had got into that whirlpool a foot, no power on earth could
have saved us. As luck would have it, we kept just outside the rim of
the suckhole, and finally escaped it.

"Then we came to the place which lies first around the bend above
us--a great deep saucer in the river, below a rock ledge of white
water--it is like a shallow bicycle track, higher at the edges, a
basin dished out in the river itself. I don't know how we got into it,
and have only a passing memory of the water running three ways, and
the high ridge in the middle, and the suckhole that followed us, and
then we slipped down into that basin at the last leg of the Z, and
through it and across it, and so right around that bend yonder, and
here to the Boat Encampment. You may believe me, we were glad enough.

"So now, adding my story to the one you'll be able to tell from here
on down, you may say that you know almost as much about the Big Bend
of the Columbia as Gabriel Franchere himself, or even Sir George
Simpson, peer of the realm of Great Britain.

"Some day they'll build a railroad around the Big Bend. Then I
believe I'll take that journey myself;