CHAPTER XY. 



I-IK-KUL, or Chehalis Creek, as the 

 whites call it, is surely one of the most 

 beautiful streams in the whole Cascade 

 Range. Its size may be stated, approxi- 

 mately, as two feet in depth by fifty 

 feet in width, at or near the mouth, but 

 its course is so crooked, so tortuous, 

 and its bed so broken and uneven that 

 the explorer will seldom find a reach 

 of it sufficiently quiet and undisturbed to afford 

 a measurement of this character. At one point 

 it is choked into a narrow gorge ten feet wide 

 and twice as deep, with a fall of ten feet in a 

 distance of thirty. Through this notch the stream 

 surges and swirls with the wild fury, the fearful 

 power, and the awe-inspiring grandeur of a tornado. 

 At another place it runs more placidly for a few 

 yards, as if to gather strength and courage for a 

 wild leap over a sheer wall of frowning rock into 

 a foaming pool thirty, forty, or fifty feet below. 

 At still another place it seems to carve its way, by 

 the sheer power of madness, through piles and 

 walls of broken and disordered quartz, granite, or 

 basalt, even as Cortes and his handful of Spanish 

 cavaliers hewed their way through the massed 

 legions of Aztecs at Tlascala. 



Farther up, or down, it is split into various 

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