nds of dried apples have been spread in the sun, and reshrunken
to their normal bulk; the sugar has all melted, and gone on its way down
the river; but we have a large sack of coffee. The lightening of the
boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better, and we shall
have but little to carry when we make a portage.

We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the
great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves
against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but
puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost
among the boulders.

We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore.
What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know
not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may
conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are
bandied out freely this morning; but to me the cheer is sombre and the
jests are ghastly.

With some eagerness, and some anxiety, and some misgiving, we enter the
canon below, and are carried along by the swift water through walls
which rise from its very edge. They have the same structure as we
noticed yesterday--tiers of irregular shelves below, and, above these,
steep slopes to the foot of marble cliffs. We run six miles in a little
more than half an hour, and emerge into a more open portion of the
canon, where high hills and ledges of rock intervene between the river
and the distant walls. Just at the head of this open place the river
runs across a dike; that is, a fissure in the rocks, open to depths
below, has been filled with eruptive matter, and this, on cooling, was
harder than the rocks through which the crevice was made, and, when
these were washed away, the harder volcanic matter remained as a wall,
and the river has cut a gateway through it several hundred feet high,
and as many wide. As it crosses the wall, there is a fall below, and a
bad rapid, filled with boulders of trap; so we stop to make a portage.
Then on we go, gliding by hills and ledges, with distant walls in view;
sweeping past sharp angles of rock; stopping at a few points to examine
rapids, which we find can be run, until we have made another five miles,
when we land for dinner.

Then we let down with lines, over a long rapid, and start again. Once
more the walls close in, and we find ourselves in a narrow gorge, the
water again filling the