In order to ease the grade the line swings from one side of the narrow valley to the other. Travelling westwards it disappears into the flank of Cathedral Mountain, describing a curve in the tunnel to emerge into the valley about 40 feet below the point where it enters the mountain side. It then strikes across the valley to enter the slopes of Wapata Mountain, where another tunnel on a curve like a corkscrew lowers the level of the line for another 40 feet. Once more it crosses the valley, the meanderings being so bewildering as to form a perfect maze. It recalls the wonderful spiral tunnel-work on the St. Gotthard railway where a similar difficulty had to be overcome, and, indeed, the conquest of the Kicking Horse Pass in this manner was based evidently upon the great work in Switzerland. Still, it marks the first application of this ingenious solution of a trying problem to the American continent. To bring the Kicking Horse Pass section of the line within the recognition of the Government, however, entailed the expenditure of some,£300,000, or $1,500,000, and found employment for about 1000 men for twenty months. Train-load after train-load of dynamite was brought up in order to enable the path to be hewn through the mountain flanks, and by the time the task was completed over 1,500,000 pounds of explosives had been used--something like,£50,000, or $250,000, had vanished literally in smoke to tear down the rock. But the outlay will be recouped well. Where four engines were required formerly two now suffice to handle a 700-ton train, and they can rattle through the Pass at a steady 25 miles an hour, whereas previously a bare six miles could be notched. Emerging from the Rockies the engineers were confronted by another towering obstacle--the Selkirks. This range was to be dreaded more than the barrier just left behind, for there was a trail through the Rockies to guide the engineers, whereas the Selkirks had never been threaded. The Indians and Hudson’s Bay _voyageurs_, after emerging from the Rockies, turned sharply south to follow the Columbia River. The first task, therefore, was to discover a rift through the Selkirks through which the metals might be carried. It was shorter to go through the mountains than to go round them if any pass could be found to exist. Major Albert B. Rogers, an American engineer, accordingly saddled his horse and with a supply of provisions set off to search for a “Pass.” He wandered up and down the range without success for week after week, and then, just as he was despairing of success, his eye alighted on a narrow breach between two serried lines of snow-clad peaks. He spurred forward, traversing territory on which the feet of neither white nor red man had been planted, climbing and toiling arduously among the crags, until at last he gained an altitude of 4,351 feet, from which the opposite sides of the range sloped down once more to the Columbia River Valley.