CANYONS OF THE COLORADO.
find a wider place, but at last we get him off. With part of the men, I take the horses back to the place where there are a few bushes growing and turn them loose; in the meantime the other men are looking for some way by which we can get down to the river. When I return, one, Captain Bishop, has found a way and gone down. We pack bread, coffee, sugar, and two or three blankets among us, and set out. It is now nearly dark, and we cannot find the way by which the captain
THE HUMAN PICKLE.
went, and an hour is spent in fruitless search. Two of the men go away around an amphitheater, more than a fourth of a mile, and start down a broken chasm that faces us who are behind. These walls, that are vertical, or nearly so, are often cut by chasms, where the showers run down,
THE RIO VIRGEN AND THE UINKARET MOUNTAINS.
and the top of these chasms will be back a distance from the face of the wall, and the bed of the chasm will slope down, with here and there a fall. At other places huge rocks have fallen and block the way. Down such a one the two men start. There is a curious plant growing out from the crevices of the rock. A dozen stems will start from one root and grow to the length of eight or ten feet and not throw out a branch or twig, but these stems are thickly covered with leaves. Now and then the two men come to a bunch of dead stems and make a fire to mark for us their way and progress.