l river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are
lighter than we could desire. We have but a month's rations remaining.
The flour has been resifted through the mosquito-net sieve; the spoiled
bacon has been dried and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds 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; the waves 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 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 about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the
jests are ghastly.

With some eagerness and some anxiety and some misgiving we enter the
canyon below and are carried along by the swift water through walls
which rise from its very edge. They have the same structure that 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
canyon, 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, was 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 f