At such a place we are letting down the last boat, and as she is set free a wave turns her broadside down the stream, with the stem, to which the line is attached, from shore and a little up. They haul on the line to bring the boat in, but the power of the current, striking obliquely against her, shoots her out into the middle of the river. The THE CANYON OF LODORE. 161 men have their hands burned with the friction of the passing line; the boat breaks away and speeds with great velocity down the stream. The "Maid of the Canyon" is lost! So it seems; but she drifts powell-canyons-109.jpg ERODED TOWERS CAPPED WITH LARGE BLOCKS OF SANDSTONE. some distance and swings into an eddy, in which she spins about until we arrive with the small boat and rescue her. Soon we are on our way again, and stop at the mouth of a little brook on the right for a late dinner. This brook comes down from the distant 162 CANYONS OF THE COLORADO. mountains in a deep side canyon. We set out to explore it, but are soon cut off from farther progress up the gorge by a high rock, over which the brook glides in a smooth sheet. The rock is not quite vertical, and the water does not plunge over it in a fall. Then we climb up to the left for an hour, and are 1,000 feet above the river and 600 above the brook. Just before us the canyon divides, a little stream coming down on the right and another on the left, and we can look away up either of these canyons, through an ascending vista, to cliffs and crags and towers a mile back and 2,000 feet overhead. To the right a dozen gleaming cascades are seen. Pines and firs stand on the rocks and aspens overhang the brooks. The rocks below are red and brown, set in deep shadows, but above they are buff and vermilion and stand in the sunshine. The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below, more gloomy powell-canyons-110.jpg FIRE IN CAMP. by reason of the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depths of the canyons, and it seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky, and a long way down to the bottom of the THE CANYON OF LODORE. 163 canyon glooms. Never before have I received such an impression of the vast heights of these canyon walls, not even at the Cliff of the Harp, where the very heavens seemed to rest on their summits. We sit on some overhanging rocks and enjoy the scene for a time, listening to the music of the falling waters away up the canyon. We name this Rippling Brook. Late in the afternoon we make a short run to the mouth of another little creek, coming down from the left into an alcove filled with luxuriant vegetation. Here camp is made, with a group of cedars on one side and a dense mass of box-elders and dead willows on the other.