They drove furiously between the white-streaked shoot of the fall and that horribly suggestive whirling; then, as they went back towards the outrush from the pool, they made another desperate, gasping effort. For several moments it seemed that they must be swept back again, and then they gained a little, and, with a few more strokes, reached the edge of the rapid. They let the canoe drive down the rapid while the boulders flashed by them, for there was the same desire in all of them, and that was to get as far as possible away from that horrible pool. At last Mattawa, standing up forward, poled the canoe in where a deep ravine rent the dark rock’s side, and the party went ashore, wet and gasping. Wheeler looked back up the gorge and solemnly shook his head.
“If you want to see any more of it, you’ve got to do it alone. I’ve had enough,” he declared. “A man who runs a pulp-mill has no use for paddling under that kind of fall. I’m not going back again.”
Mattawa and Gordon set the tent up in the hollow of the ravine, while Wheeler hewed off spruce branches with which to make the beds; but Nasmyth did nothing to assist any of them. Thinking hard, he sat on a boulder, with his unlighted pipe in his hand. The throbbing roar of water rang about him; and it was then that the great project crept into his mind. It was rapidly growing dark in the bottom of the great rift, but he could still see the dim white flashing of the fall and the vast wall of rock and rugged hillside that ran up in shadowy grandeur, high above his head, and as he gazed at it all he felt his heart throb fast. He was conscious of a curious thrill as he watched and listened to that clash of stupendous forces. The river had spent countless ages cutting out that channel, hurling down mighty boulders and stream-driven shingle upon the living rock; but it was, it seemed to him, within man’s power to alter it in a few arduous months. He 104 sat very still, astonished at the daring of his own conception, until Wheeler strolled up to him.
“How much does the river drop at the fall?” he asked.
“About eight feet in the fall itself,” answered Wheeler. “Seems to me it falls much more in the rush above. Still, I can’t say I noticed it particularly––I had something else to think about.”
“It’s a short rapid,” remarked Nasmyth reflectively. “There is, no doubt, a great deal of the hardest kind of rock under it, which is, in one or two respects, unfortunate. I suppose you don’t know very much about geology?”
“I don’t,” confessed the pulp-miller. “Machines are my specialty.”
“Well,” said Nasmyth, “I’m afraid I don’t either, and I believe one or two of these cañons have puzzled wiser folks than I. You see, the general notion is that the rivers made them, but it doesn’t seem quite reasonable to imagine a river tilting at a solid range and splitting it through the middle. In fact, it seems to me that some of the cañons were there already, and the rivers just ran into them. One or two Indians have come down from the valley close to the fall, and they told me the river was quite deep there. The rock just holds it up at the fall. It’s a natural dam––a dyke, I think they call it.”
“I don’t quite understand what all this is leading to,” observed Wheeler.