ed almost to meet, showing
between them only a narrow ribbon of bright blue sky, and below us the
chasm went down sheer for a thousand feet; a gloomy depth that our eyes
could not have penetrated had there not gleamed at the bottom of it the
foam and sparkle of a little stream. Here the path was hewn almost
continuously out of the solid rock; and we could see that a like path
was cut in the rock on the other side. That so prodigious a piece of
work should be thus duplicated seemed to us a very astonishing waste of
energy; for even Young did not have much faith in his own suggestion
that two prehistoric railway companies had secured rights of way along
the opposite sides of the canon, and had begun the building there of
rival lines.

But the matter was explained, presently, by our finding that this other
path was but a doubling of the path that we were on. As we rounded a
turn in the canon we came suddenly to a broad natural ledge in the rock,
over which hung a great projection of the cliff so that the sky above
was hid from us. Here our path went off into the air, and began again on
the other side of the vastly deep chasm, a good sixty feet away. "Rather
long for a jump," was Rayburn's curt comment as we pulled up on the edge
of the precipice and looked at each other blankly. Yet it was evident
that those who had made with such great expense of toil and time these
path-ways on the opposite sides of the canon had crossed in some way
from the one to the other at this point, and the only surmise that
seemed to fit the facts of the case was that there had been stretched
across the chasm a swinging bridge of _lianas_--such as still are to be
found spanning streams in the hot lands of Mexico--and that in the
course of ages this had rotted entirely away. But as this bridge, if
ever there had been one here, was absolutely gone, we found ourselves in
as shrewdly strait a place as men well could be in. To go ahead was as
clearly impossible as was the hopelessness of turning back upon our
path. At the most, we could only return to the valley out of which we
had climbed with such thankfulness; and rather than go back to die of
starvation in that place, so beautiful and so desolate, there was not
one of us but would have chosen to end all quickly by springing into
the gulf above which we stood.

But while we thus stood in dreary contemplation of the miserable
prospect before us, Young, as his habit was, was spying about him
sharpl