Part 40 (1/2)

We made our camp where we had landed, resting and repairing our boat.

The river went down as rapidly as it had come up, for the flood had been due to a cloud burst and not to melting snow or a continuous storm.

On the third morning we were all ready to start upon the final round with the Colorado River. Before us was the marble canyon and the great gorge of the Grand Canyon.

Tom and I had recovered our equilibrium by the time we were ready to reembark. We felt reasonably confident of being able to navigate the gorges which were ahead.

”I shall be glad when we get through with this hilarious and irregular life,” said Tom. ”I don't believe any of us would have started if we could have known what we would have to go through with.”

”I would,” claimed Jim. ”We have to hustle sometimes. But if you had stayed in the peaceful East you would have probably have gone bathing in some mill pond and got a cramp and drowned.”

”You can't stop long enough in these darned canyons to get drowned,”

growled Tom.

We all laughed heartily at Tom's complaints. He was never so funny as when he was irritable.

”Another thing,” said Tom in conclusion, ”I'm not going to give up that search for treasure till we find it.”

About noon of the day we started we saw ahead of us the s.h.i.+ning walls of the greatest chasm that we had yet faced.

”Is that the Grand Canyon itself?” I asked.

”No,” said Jim, who had been studying the maps carefully during our last stop. ”That must be the Marble Canyon. The Little Colorado will come in below there somewhere.”

”Is it really marble?” inquired Tom.

”You can see for yourself soon,” said Jim.

However, names are deceitful things. It was indeed a marvelous gorge into which we entered. Where the waves of the river had worked, there shone a beautiful greyish marble, cut in curious deep lines by the action of the water, but above the walls were stained a deep red.

There was a ma.s.sive solidness about this marble canyon that made the sandstone gorges appear light and airy. The walls rose in places to over three thousand feet in height.

Sometimes the walls were in thousand-foot terraces, sometimes well nigh perpendicular, at least so it seemed. It was, with all its grandeur, only the entrance hall for the Grand Canyon itself. Its peculiarity was in the sharp thrust out cliffs that rose perpendicularly from the river.

The Little Colorado was well named, for the river itself was but a small stream, but the narrow gorge by which it entered was impressive. It is the mingling of the Little Colorado with Marble Canyon that const.i.tutes the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

But it in reality is not quite so magically logical as that, since from miles below the entrance of the Little Colorado, the canyon walls fall away from the river and the canyon is like a great valley with perpendicular walls removed for several miles on either side of the river, and rising to a height of five thousand feet. Before us lay the great gorge, where the river seemed to lose itself in granite gloom as it wound downwards.

”Let's make a camp in this valley,” suggested Jim, ”and do some climbing before we take our last sprint down the river.”

”I guess it will be our last too,” groaned Tom, gloomily.

”Oh shut up!” commanded Jim wearily, giving him a kick with his moccasined foot. ”You ought to have lived in the times of Jeremiah.”

”You ought to have lived in the Stone Age,” retorted Tom, ”it would have just suited you.”

We made camp near a pleasant looking green stretch of sh.o.r.e and on the following day we started out on our little picnic excursion that consumed several days.

It would take another book to describe what we saw on that trip. After some remarkably hard work and interesting climbing we reached the rim of the canyon, some six thousand feet above the Colorado, that seemed but a narrow rivulet and its long familiar roar was reduced to a gentle purr of sound.