Based on purple, then a wonderful brown; widest of all the rich red of the sandstone, while the highest pinnacles, peaks and plateaus had a coping of white limestone to correspond with the eight hundred feet of the same rock just below the rim.
But who shall tell of the glories of the sunset as the light fades from the white of the western wall and the vast, vast canyon is filled with the purple shadows!
"Wouldn't it jar you?" exclaimed Jim, the first to break the awestruck silence that bound us, when its immensity first came under our eyes.
"Yes," said Tom, "if you stepped off it would."
Without foreboding, but with grim determination, we left our pleasant camp on the bank of the river and swinging out into the current we headed for the gorge.
Then in a moment we were swallowed up between its jaws as a fly goes into the mouth of a lion. We were enured to dangers and terrible hazards, these we were prepared to meet, nor did we encounter anything equal to the flood of the week before. In that the Colorado had done its worst.
But it was the sombreness and the gloom of that granite gorge that overwhelmed us. It seemed as I have said, as though the river as it plunged and roared downward between the dark and narrow walls, was carrying us down into some nether and long-forgotten hell.
We could see little of the glorious upper canyon that was on either side of the gorge whose walls rose perpendicularly above us for fifteen hundred feet.
"One good thing about it," said Tom, "when we get through with this we are through for certain."
"It won't take us long if we keep up this gait," I said, as we swept downward like an express train, and the walls going by as fences do when you look out from a car window. We ran into one terrible rapid where the river was lashed into a mass of foam from wall to wall.