In such a bay Major Powell landed one day, and, seeing one of the rear boats making for the shore after he had given his signal, he supposed the others would follow her example, and walked along the side of the cañon-wall to look for the fall of which a loud roar gave some premonition. But a treacherous eddy carried the boat manned by the two Howlands and Goodman into the current, and a moment later she disappeared over the unseen falls. The first fall was not great—not more than ten or twelve feet—but below the river sweeps down forty or fifty feet through a channel filled with spiked rocks which break it into whirlpools and frothy crests. Major Powell scrambled around a crag just in time to see the boat strike one of these rocks, and, rebounding from the shock, careen and fill the open compartment with water. The oars were dashed out of the hands of two of the crew as she swung around and was carried down the stream with great velocity, and immediately after she struck another rock amidships, which broke her in two and threw the men into the water. The larger part of the wreck floated buoyantly, and seizing it the men supported themselves by it until a few hundred feet farther down they came to a second fall, filled with huge boulders, upon which the wreck was dashed to pieces, and the men and the fragments were again carried out of Major Powell's sight. He struggled along the scant foothold afforded by the cañon-wall, and coming suddenly to a bend saw one of the men in a whirlpool below a large rock, to which he was clinging with all possible tenacity. It was Goodman, and a little farther on was Howland tossed upon a small island, with his brother stranded upon a rock some distance below. Howland struck out for Goodman with a pole, by means of which he relieved him from his precarious position, and very soon the wrecked crew stood together, bruised, shaken and scared, but not disabled. A swift, dangerous river was on each side of them and a fall below them. It was now a problem how to release them from this imprisonment. Sumner volunteered, and in one of the other boats started out from above the island, and with skilful paddling landed upon it. Together with the three shipwrecked men he then pushed up stream until all stood up to their necks in water, when one of them braced himself against a rock and held the boat while the three others jumped into her: the man on the rock followed, and all four then pulled vigorously for the shore, which they reached in safety. Many years before an adventurous trapper and his party had been wrecked here and several lives had been lost. Major Powell named the spot Disaster Falls.
The cliffs are so high that the twilight is perpetual, and the sky seems like a flat roof pressed across them. As the worn men stretched themselves out in their blankets they saw a bright star that appeared to rest on the very verge of the eastern cliff, and then to float from its resting-place on the rock over the cañon. At first it was like a jewel set on the brink of the cliff, and as it moved out from the rock they wondered that it did not fall. It did seem to descend in a gentle curve, and the other stars were apparently in the cañon, as if the sky was spread over the gulf, resting on either wall and swayed down by its own weight.
Sixteen days after leaving Green River City the explorers reached the end of the Cañon of Lodore, which is nearly twenty-four miles long. The walls were never less than two thousand feet high except near the foot. They are very irregular, standing in perpendicular or overhanging cliffs here, terraced there, or receding in steep slopes broken by many side-gulches. The highest point of the wall is twenty-seven hundred feet, but the peaks a little distance off are a thousand feet higher. Yellow pines, nut pines, firs and cedars stand in dense forests on the Uintah Mountains, and clinging to moving rocks they have come down the walls to the water's edge between Flaming Gorge and Echo Park. The red sandstones are lichened over, delicate mosses grow in the moist places and ferns festoon the walls.
HORSESHOE CAÑON.
A few days later they were upset again, losing oars, guns and barometers, and on July 18th they had only enough provisions left for two months, though they had supplied themselves with quantities which, barring accidents, should have lasted ten months. On July 19th the Grand Cañon of the Colorado became visible, and from an eminence they could follow its course for miles and catch glimpses of the river. The Green, down which they had come so far, bears in from the north-west through a narrow, winding gorge. The Grand comes in from the north-east through a channel which from the explorer's point of view seems bottomless. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock, with grotesque forms intervening. In the east a chain of eruptive mountains is visible, the slopes covered with pines, the summits coated with snow and the gulches flanked by great crags. Wherever the men looked there were rocks, deep gorges in which the rivers were lost under cliffs, towers and pinnacles, thousands of strangely-carved forms, and mountains blending with the clouds. They passed the junction of the Grand and Green, and on July 21st they were on the Colorado itself. The walls are nearly vertical, and the river is broad and swift, but free from rocks and falls. From the edge of the water to the brink of the cliffs is nearly two thousand feet, and the cliffs are reflected on the quiet surface until it seems to the travellers that there is a vast abyss below them. But the tranquillity is not lasting: a little way below this space of majestic calm it was necessary to make three portages in succession, the distance being less than three-quarters of a mile, with a fall of seventy-five feet. In the evening Major Powell sat upon a rock by the edge of the river to look at the water and listen to its roar. Heavy shadows settled in the cañon as the sun passed behind the cliffs, and no glint of light remained on the crags above, but the waves were crested with a white that seemed luminous. A great fall broke at the foot of a block of limestone fifty feet high, and rolled back in immense billows. Over the sunken rocks the flood was heaped up into mounds and even cones. The tumult was extraordinary. At a point where the rocks were very near the surface the water was thrown up ten or fifteen feet, and fell back in gentle curves as in a fountain.
On August 3d the party traversed a cañon of diversified features. The walls were still vertical in places, especially near the bends, and the river sweeping round the capes had undermined the cliffs. Sometimes the rocks overarched: again curious narrow glens were found. The men explored the glens, in one of which they discovered a natural stairway several hundred feet high leading to a spring which burst out from an overhanging cliff among aspens and willows, while along the edges of the brooklet there were oaks and other rich vegetation. There were also many side-cañons with walls nearer to each other above than below, giving them the character of grottoes; and there were carved walls, arches, alcoves and monuments, to all of which the collective name of Glen Cañon was given.
One morning the surveyors came to a point where the river filled the entire channel and the walls were sheer to the water's edge. They saw a fall below, and in order to inspect it they pulled up against one of the cliffs, in which was a little shelf or crevice a few feet above their heads. One man stood on the deck of the boat while another climbed over his shoulders into this insecure foothold, along which they passed until it became a shelf which was broken by a chasm some yards farther on. They then returned to the boat and pulled across the stream for some logs which had lodged on the opposite shore, and with which it was intended to bridge the gulf. It was no easy work hauling the wood along the fissure, but with care and patience they accomplished it, and reached a point in the cliffs from which the falls could be seen. It seemed practicable to lower the boats over the stormy waters by holding them with ropes from the cliffs; and this was done successfully, the incident illustrating how laborious their progress sometimes became.
The scenery was of unending interest. The rocks were of many colors—white, gray, pink and purple, with saffron tints. At an elbow of the river the water has excavated a semicircular chamber which would hold fifty thousand people, and farther on the cliffs are of softly-tinted marble lustrously polished by the waves. At one place Major Powell walked for more than a mile on a marble pavement fretted with strange devices and embossed with a thousand different patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shone on this floor, which gleamed with iridescent beauty. Exploring the cleft, Major Powell found a succession of pools one above another, and each cold and clear, though the water of the river was a dull red. Then a bend in the cañon disclosed a massive abutment that seemed to be set with a million brilliant gems as they approached it, and every one wondered. As they came closer to it they saw many springs bursting from the rock high overhead, and the spray in the sunshine forms the gems which glitter in the walls, at the base of which is a profusion of mosses, ferns and flowers. To the place above where the three portages were necessary the name of Cataract Cañon was given; and they were now well into the Grand Cañon itself. The walls were more than a mile in height, and, as Major Powell says, a vertical altitude like this is not easily pictured. "Stand on the south steps of the Treasury Building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Park, and measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that altitude, and you will understand what I mean," the explorer has written; "or stand at Canal street in New York and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have about the distance; or stand at the Lake street bridge in Chicago and look down to the Central Dépôt, and you have it again." A thousand feet of the distance is through granite crags, above which are slopes and perpendicular cliffs to the summit. The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above.
