Ned, Bob and the professor looked. Below them they saw a great gash in the earth—a gash a mile or more in depth, and the sides of which were of black rock, mingled here and there with marble colored red, pink and blue, with an occasional bright yellow. Then came sandstone rocks, vivid in color. It was like looking into a great winding trough, wherein a painter had mixed his colors.
And, at the very bottom, like a silver thread, ran the river, zig-zagging in and out amid the mighty cliffs that towered on either side. Cliffs now hemming in the powerful stream, and again spreading out for ten or twenty miles. But the river itself was kept in narrow bounds.
And the very narrowness of these bounds made the stream rush along with such tremendous power, for it was a veritable Niagara in places. White and foam-capped, again black and deep, with awful power it hurled itself along.
Above this scene of awful grandeur hovered the airship, and, as the boys looked, they saw how slight indeed was the power of their craft, compared to the mighty forces that had cut this gash in the earth, and which power still sent the river on its downward way.
“And we’ve got to go down there?” asked Bob softly.
“That’s it,” answered Jerry. “Do you wonder no boat ever lived to make the passage? Or, at best, very few of them?”
“And that is where the scientist was lost,” murmured Uriah Snodgrass. “I wonder if we shall ever find him—alive—or dead?”
And, as the boys gazed at the foaming river, down in the awful depths, it seemed impossible that human beings could ever have navigated it. But in the airship the problem was much easier.
“Now for Snake Island!” cried Jerry, as, having stopped the Comet in order that all might get a good view, he started the motor again. “Now for Snake Island!”
“And the radium!” cried Ned.