nish of the second route is directly over the summit of a
mountain. You climb two thousand feet and then drop down five. The
ascent is heart-breaking but safe. The descent is hair-raising and
unsafe: no profanity can do justice to it. Out of a pack-train of
thirty mules, nine were lost in the course of that five thousand feet.
Legend has it that once many years ago certain prospectors took in a
Chinese cook. At first the Mongolian bewailed his fate loudly and
fluently, but later settled to a single terrified moan that sounded
like "tu-ne-mah! tu-ne-mah!" The trail was therefore named the
"Tu-ne-mah Trail." It is said that "tu-ne-mah" is the very worst
single vituperation of which the Chinese language is capable.

The third route is called "Hell's Half Mile." It is not misnamed.

Thus like paradise the canon is guarded; but like paradise it is
wondrous in delight. For when you descend you find that the tape-wide
trickle of water seen from above has become a river with profound
darkling pools and placid stretches and swift dashing rapids; that the
dark green sluggish flow in the canon-bed has disintegrated into a
noble forest with great pine-trees, and shaded aisles, and deep dank
thickets, and brush openings where the sun is warm and the birds are
cheerful, and groves of cottonwoods where all day long softly, like
snow, the flakes of cotton float down through the air. Moreover there
are meadows, spacious lawns, opening out, closing in, winding here and
there through the groves in the manner of spilled naphtha, actually
waist high with green feed, sown with flowers like a brocade. Quaint
tributary little brooks babble and murmur down through these trees,
down through these lawns. A blessed warm sun hums with the joy of
innumerable bees. To right hand and to left, in front of you and
behind, rising sheer, forbidding, impregnable, the cliffs, mountains,
and ranges hem you in. Down the river ten miles you can go: then the
gorge closes, the river grows savage, you can only look down the
tumbling fierce waters and turn back. Up the river five miles you can
go, then interpose the sheer snow-clad cliffs of the Palisades, and
them, rising a matter of fourteen thousand feet, you may not cross.
You are shut in your paradise as completely as though surrounded by
iron bars.

But, too, the world is shut out. The paradise is yours. In it are
trout and deer and grouse and bear and lazy happy days. Your horses
feed to