We descend the mountain side to the bed of the river and follow the gravel banks. Before we reach our night’s camping ground we meet with some remarkable scenery. Looking upwards to the south at about an angle of sixty degrees, we can see high, in the clear air, a mountain peak which, lighted up by the sun, presents in its horizontal strata various colours, and assumes the form of a mural crown. Separated from this height by a great depression rises a sister peak singularly striking, both undoubtedly rising to a vertical mile above the river. A great glacier on the second mountain overhangs a precipice with a face of hundreds of feet in thickness: at the base _debris_ has gathered for countless centuries to form an immense deposit sloping down the mountain. We cross its base, and accept the first place suitable for a camp which we reach. Grass for the horses is the first requirement, water we can always count upon. Our saddle horses have travelled twelve miles, the journey of the pack-horses has been seventeen. It was still early in the afternoon, but the strain upon the poor animals had been severe. The last six miles had taken four hours and a half to pass over; and then there had been no mid-day halt and feed. There cannot be a doubt that one of the secrets of driving a horse long continuous distances is to let him take his own pace and feed him regularly. Any one who has had any experience with horses well knows that the creature will by a hundred ways let you know when he looks for his food should you neglect to give it him. There is everything to show that he suffers in strength if there be great irregularity in this respect. We learn that there is no pasture in our front for a long distance, so we camp on the gravelly beach. The ground we are on, at high water, is covered, and a few rods from us the river is winding on its rapid, rolling course. The horses are provided for in a gully near by. Close to us rise four massive, lofty mountains, and as we turn to their summits the eye is raised from forty to fifty degrees. A blue sky looks down between these heights through an atmosphere free from smoke. These high peaks rising directly from the valley form the points of a quadrilateral figure, the longest side of which does not exceed three miles. There are no foot hills, no intervening eminence between us and these mountains, rising 5,000 feet above where we stand. The sun sets behind the western heights. I have often felt the calm of evening, but I do not recollect so perfect a picture of quiet and repose as that which reigned in this amphitheatre of nature in the first twilight, when everything was marked and distinct, but with subdued colour, with no high lights, and presenting a solitude so vast that one for the time loses all consciousness of the existence of an outer world.