ON THE PRAlh 229 



brink for a mile or so. It was a great chasm, 

 many miles in length, as if the table-land 

 had been rent asunder by some terrible and 

 unknown force; its sides were sheer walls 

 of rock, rising three or four hundred feet 

 straight up in the air, and worn by the 

 weather till they looked like the towers and 

 battlements of some vast fortress. Between 

 them at the bottom was a space, in some 

 places nearly a quarter of a mile \ 

 other narrow, through whose middle 



foamed a deep, rapid torrent of which the 

 sources lay far back among the snow-topped 

 mountains around Cloud Peak. In this val- 

 ley, dark-green, sombre pines stood in 

 groups, stiff and erect; and here and there 

 among them were groves of poplar and cot- 

 ton wood, with slender branches and trem- 

 bling leaves, their bright green already chan- 

 ging to yellow in the sharp fall weather. We 

 went down to where the mouth of the can- 

 yon opened out, and rode our horses to the 

 end of a great jutting promontory of rock, 

 thrust out into the plain; and in the cold, 



