From Chicoutimi down to Tadousac the region of the Saguenay chasm is practically without habitation. There are two or three small villages, chiefly abodes of timber-cutters, but it is otherwise uninhabited; nor do the precipitous cliffs usually leave any place near the river for a dwelling to be put. As the visitor goes along on the steamboat it is a steady and monotonous panorama of dark, dreary, round-topped crags, with stunted firs sparsely clinging to their sides and tops where crevices will let them, while the faces of the cliffs are white, gray, brown and black, as their granites change in color. A few frothy but attenuated cascades pour down narrow fissures. The scene, while sublime, is forbidding, and soon becomes so monotonous as to be tiresome. This gaunt and savage landscape culminates in Eternity Bay. Ponderous buttresses here guard the narrow gulf on the southern shore, formed by the outflow of a little river. The western portal, Cape Trinity, as the steamboat approaches from above, appears as a series of huge steps, each five hundred feet high, and the faithful missionaries have climbed up and placed a tall white statue of the Virgin on one of the steps, about seven hundred feet above the river, and a large cross on the next higher step, both being seen from afar. Passing around into the bay, the gaunt eastern face of this enormous promontory is found to be a perpendicular wall of the rawest granite, standing sixteen hundred feet straight up from the water. At the top it grandly rises on the bay side into three huge crown-like domes, which, upon being seen by the original French explorers when they came up the river, made them appropriately name it the Trinity. This is one of the most awe-inspiring promontories human eyes ever beheld, as it rises sheer out of water over half a mile deep. Across the narrow bay, the eastern portal, Cape Eternity, similarly rises in solemn grandeur, with solid unbroken sides and a wooded top fully as high. The entire Saguenay River is of much the same character, repeating these crags and promontories in myriad forms. While not always as high, yet the enclosing mountains elsewhere are almost as impressive and fully as dismal. The steamboat, aided by the swift tide, moves rapidly through the deep canyon, one rounded peak and long ridge being much like the others, with the same monotonous dreariness everywhere, and every rift disclosing only more distant sombre mountains. The chasm throughout its length has no beacons for navigation, the shores being so steep and the waters so deep they are unnecessary. A sense of relief is felt when the open waters at Tadousac and the St. Lawrence are reached, for the journey makes everyone feel much like a writer in the London _Times_, who said of it: "Unlike Niagara and all other of God's great works in nature, one does not wish for silence or solitude here. Companionship becomes doubly necessary in an awful solitude like this."