It rains. The clouds discharge their moisture in torrents, and we make for ourselves shelters of boughs, only to be soon abandoned, and we stand shivering by a great fire of pine logs and boughs, which the pelting storm half extinguishes. One, two, three, four hours of the storm, and at last it partially abates. During this time our animals, which we have turned loose, have sought for themselves shelter under the trees, and two of them have wandered away beyond our sight. I go out to follow their tracks, and come near to the brink of a ledge of rocks, which, in the fog and mist, I suppose to be a little ridge, and I look for a way by which I can go down. Standing just here, there is a rift made in the fog below by some current or blast of wind, which reveals an almost bottomless abyss. I look from the brink of a great precipice of more than 2,000 feet; but through the mist the forms are half obscured and all reckoning of distance is lost, and it seems 10,000 feet, ten miles--any distance the imagination desires to make it. Catching our animals, we return to the camp. We find that the little streams which come down from the plateau are greatly swollen, but at camp they have had no rain. The clouds which drifted up from the south, striking against the plateau, were lifted up into colder regions and discharged their moisture on the summit and against the sides of the plateau, but there was no rain in the valley below. September 9.--We make a fair start this morning from the beautiful meadow at the head of the Kanab, cross the line of little hills at the headwaters of the Rio Virgen, and pass, to the south, a pretty valley. At ten o'clock we come to the brink of a great geographic bench--a line of THE RIO VIRGEN AND THE UINKARET MOUNTAINS. 293 cliffs. Behind us are cool springs, green meadows, and forest-clad slopes; below us, stretching to the south until the world is lost in blue haze, is a painted desert--not a desert plain, but a desert of rocks cut by deep gorges and relieved by towering cliffs and pinnacled rocks--naked rocks, brilliant in the sunlight. By a difficult trail we make our way down the basaltic ledge, through which innumerable streams here gather into a little river running in a deep canyon. The river runs close to the foot of the cliffs on the right-hand side and the trail passes along to the right. At noon we rest and our animals feed on luxuriant grass. Again we start and make slow progress along a stony way. At night we camp under an overarching cliff.