a thousand feet to the top of the granite;
so it will be impossible to carry our boats around, though we can climb
to the summit up a side gulch and, passing along a mile or two, descend
to the river. This we find on examination; but such a portage would be
impracticable for us, and we must run the rapid or abandon the river.
There is no hesitation. We step into our boats, push off, and away we
go, first on smooth but swift water, then we strike a glassy wave and
ride to its top, down again into the trough, up again on a higher wave,
and down and up on waves higher and still higher until we strike one
just as it curls back, and a breaker rolls over our little boat. Still
on we speed, shooting past projecting rocks, till the little boat is
caught in a whirlpool and spun round several times. At last we pull out
again into the stream. And now the other boats have passed us. The open
compartment of the "Emma Dean" is filled with water and every breaker
rolls over us. Hurled back from a rock, now on this side, now on that,
we are carried into an eddy, in which we struggle for a few minutes, and
are then out again, the breakers still rolling over us. Our boat is
unmanageable, but she cannot sink, and we drift down another hundred
yards through breakers--how, we scarcely know. We find the other boats
have turned into an eddy at the foot of the fall and are waiting to
catch us as we come, for the men have seen that our boat is swamped.
They push out as we come near and pull us in against the wall. Our boat
bailed, on we go again.

The walls now are more than a mile in height--a vertical distance
difficult to appreciate. Stand on the south steps of the Treasury
building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol;
measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that
altitude, and you will understand what is meant; or stand at Canal
Street in New York and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have
about the distance; or stand at Lake Street bridge in Chicago and look
down to the Central Depot, and you have it again.

A thousand feet of this is up through granite crags; then steep slopes
and perpendicular cliffs rise one above another to the summit. The gorge
is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags
and angular projections on the walls, which, cut in many places by side
canyons, seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down in these grand,
gloomy depths we glide, e