It was with eager interest that we despatched a hasty breakfast, and attached our cars to the early morning express westward bound from Gunnison. The Grand Cañon of the Gunnison lay just ahead. An open “observation” car, crowded with sightseers, was hooked on behind us, but that did not interfere with our favorite rear platform, and thither our camp-stools were taken.
This river Gunnison has a hard time of it. The streams that finally unite to make it up, are loath to do so, and it came near not being born at all. The flat country we see just below the town vouchsafes a few quiet miles under the cottonwoods, but presently the hills close in, and then the river must needs gird up its loins for a struggle such as few other streams in the wide world know. Its life thenceforth is that of a warrior; and it never lays aside its knightly armor till the very end in the absorbing flood of the Grand.
Above the rattle of the train, echoing from the rocky highlands that hem it in, we can hear the roaring of this water as we thunder down its sinuous course toward Sapinero. Great fragments that have fallen from the steep banks, where an avalanche of stones lies precariously as though even the shock of our passing would set them sliding, fret the stream with continual interruptions and turn its green flood into lines of yeasty white. These same rocks are admirable fishing-stands, however, for the trout love the deeply aërated water that swirls about them; and we see more than one silvery fin snatched from its crystal home to hang in mute misery upon the angler’s switch of forked willow.
“Do you think it’s right?” asks the Madame, with a pitiful tone in her voice.
“No, but it can’t be helped; and you’ll find some casuistry to meet the case about dinner-time.”
“Casuistry—casuistry?” says Chum reflectively. “Is that a new kind of sauce?”
Ahead the green hills, marked with horizontal lines, that we suspect to indicate outcroppings of lava, shut quite across our path. Nevertheless we can detect a dark depression toward which the track points straight as an arrow, and we suppose that at that point an entrance exists. Behind it stood summits so lofty that this barrier did not seem imposing; but now that a gateway has opened (yet far enough only for our track to enter by encroaching on the river’s highway), we are surprised at the altitude of the walls which momently rise higher and higher on each side, as though we were descending a steep incline into the earth. At what an abyss must the river lie in the middle of the range!
