"Perhaps it is an Alaskan joke," I suggested feebly.
We stood for some time trying to decide whether we should make the descent or return to White Horse, when suddenly the matter was decided for us. I was standing on the brink of the sandy precipice, down which a path went, almost perpendicularly, without bend or pause, to the bank of the river several hundred yards below.
The sandy soil upon which I stood suddenly caved and went down into the path. I went with it. I landed several yards below the brink, gave one cry, and then—by no will of my own—was off for the canyon.
The caving of the brink had started a sand and gravel slide; and I, knee-deep in it, was going down with it—slowly, but oh, most surely. There was no pausing, no looking back. I could hear my companion calling to me to "stop"; to "wait"; to "be careful"—and all her entreaties were the bitterest irony by the time they floated down to me. So long as the slide did not stop, it was useless to tell me to do so; for I was embedded in it halfway to my waist. We kept going, slowly and hesitatingly; but never slowly enough for me to get out.
It was eighty in the shade, and the sand was hot. I was wearing a white waist, a dark blue cheviot skirt, and patent-leather shoes; and my appearance, when I finally reached level ground and cool alder trees, may be imagined. Furthermore, our trunks had been bonded to Dawson, and I had no extra skirts or shoes with me.
My companion, profiting by my misfortune, had armed herself with an alpenstock and was "tacking" down the slope. It was half an hour before she arrived.
I have never forgiven her for the way she laughed.
We soon forgot the bears in the beauty of the scene before us. We even forgot the comedy of my unwilling descent.
The Lewes River gradually narrows from a width of three or four hundred yards to one of about fifty yards at the mouth of the Grand Canyon, which it enters in a great bore.
The walls of the canyon are perpendicular columns and palisades of basalt. They rise without bend to a height of from one to two hundred feet, and then, set thickly with dark and gloomy spruce trees, slope gradually into mountains of considerable height. The canyon is five-eighths of a mile long, and in that interval the water drops thirty feet. Halfway through, it widens abruptly into a round water chamber, or basin, where the waters boil and seethe in dangerous whirlpools and eddies. Then it again narrows, and the waters rush wildly and tumultuously through walls of dark stone, veined with gray and lavender. The current runs fifteen miles an hour, and rafts "shooting" the rapids are hurled violently from side to side, pushed on end, spun round in whirlpools, buried for seconds in boiling foam, and at last are shot through the final narrow avenue like spears from a catapult—only to plunge madly on to the more dangerous White Horse Rapids.