They found it half a mile below. The new channel was carrying a swift current, but the water was deep and there were no falls, so the boys got up full power and started up. The motor boat had the fight of her life, but she went up gallantly, sometimes hesitating, but always gaining in the end, until they came out above the falls.
“A few more like that,” Clay declared, wiping the sweat from his face, “and we’ll have to take the Rambler to the repair shop. That was a hard struggle for the old boat.”
From that time the voyage was not so strenuous, still, the going was rather more difficult than that encountered on the Columbia river trip. There were times when the boys were obliged to unload the boat and almost carry her, times when ropes were used to assist her up swift sweeps of water; but, then, there were wide valleys where Indians tilled small patches of earth, and where there were green things in view always. Whenever opportunity offered the boys procured water from springs in the hills, for the waters of the Colorado are full of the silt washed down from the mountains.
The Colorado river was born when the Rocky Mountains lifted their peaks above the continent. From their lofty heights the collected moisture flowed down on the plains below until a river was formed. From the base of the mountains to the ocean level there is a fall of a mile, so the river runs swiftly. The water cuts out the light soil and also heaps it up. In the canyons the river runs 6,000 feet below the level of the plateau, and people on the desert above might die with thirst because of the impossibility of getting down to the water.
The Colorado is forever changing its course and currents. Here mud flats are forming, there a bank is being washed away. Here a mighty rock topples into the stream, there the water cuts around a tower, leaving a pillar three hundred feet high, standing out alone! The river, ages ago, entered the Gulf of California where Yuma is now; in a few centuries it will fill up and make a level plain of the entire Gulf. It deposits silt enough in one year to cover sixty-six square miles of territory with sediment a foot deep! It is working hard to level the continent, ably assisted by the Columbia, the Mississippi, the Frazer, the Snake and the Gila!
The boys will never forget those days and nights on the Colorado. It was a golden time, and at last the Grand Canyon opened before them!
CHAPTER XVI.—CONCERNING A HEADLESS GHOST.
“Now,” Clay suggested, on the morning following the arrival at the mouth of the mightiest canyon on earth, “we may as well make up our minds that we can’t go very much farther in the Rambler. We will go in as far as we can, then tie up and investigate the great mystery.”
“If you want to see the Grand Canyon to good advantage,” Don advised, “get up on the plateau and look down and across. At the level of the river you see little save blue sky and rock, and you see those like one looking out of a well! Besides, it is pretty hot down here.
“There is little breeze, and we are a mile or more nearer the center of the earth than those at the lips of the cut. When it snows up above it rains down here. Clumps of willows which grow in the canyon look like fringes of grass from above. The houses where the guides and a few Indians live look like soap-boxes from the top.