FAR AND NEAR 



Dark-eared and dark-tailed gray hares bounded 

 away or eyed us from cover. Horned larks were 

 common, and the sage sparrow, the meadowlark, 

 and other birds were seen and heard. 



Shoshone Falls are in Snake River, which later on 

 becomes the Columbia. The river does not flow in 

 a valley like our Eastern rivers, but in walled can- 

 yons which it has cut into the lava plain to the depth 

 of nearly a thousand feet. The only sign we could 

 see of it, when ten miles away, was a dark heavy 

 line here and there on the green purple plain, the 

 opposite rim of the great gorge. 



Near noon we reached a break, a huge gateway, 

 in the basaltic rocks, and were upon the brink of the 

 canyon itself. It was a sudden vision of elemental 

 grandeur and power opening up at our feet. Our 

 eyes had been reveling in purple distances, in the 

 soft tints of the sagebrush plain, and in the flowers 

 and long, gentle, flowing hills, when suddenly the 

 earth opened and we looked into a rocky chasm 

 nearly a thousand feet deep, with the river and the 

 falls roaring at the bottom of it. The grand, the 

 terrible, the sublime were sprung upon us in a twin- 

 kling. The chasm is probably a mile or more broad, 

 with perpendicular sides of toppling columnar lava 

 eight hundred feet high. A roadway, carved out of 

 the avalanches of loose rocks that hang upon the 

 sides of the awful gulf, winds down to the river and 

 to the cable ferry above the falls. Our party, in 

 12 



