Dozvn Tenaya Canon. 



163 



off any moment by falling fragments of this same majes- 

 tic scenery. Confidence in the soundness of the Theory 

 of ProbabiHties had settled my nerves for the trip, so I 

 fared along on the lookout for creature comforts, borrow- 

 ing no trouble. 



The ''Jumping-off Place" passed, like most human be- 

 ings I pushed on down hill beside the stream as rapidly 

 as I could, forgetting all about my serviceable theory of 

 the bear trail, still on the right or west bank — the only 

 one, apparently, on which I could proceed, as the opposite 

 bank was a bare, vertical wall several hundred feet high. 

 The water dashed wildly from shelf to shelf, squirming 

 and twisting and leaping among the obstructions — now 

 rapids, now waterfalls, now cascades — always noisy, 

 always hurrying, nearly always unapproachable. Some- 

 times the brush and sliding ground drove me to the river. 

 Sometimes the enormous boulders in the river bed or the 

 impossible angled, glassy surfaces drove me back up the 

 side of the gorge to the brush and the treacherous foot- 

 holds. It was hard, hard work, even if it was going down 

 hill. Virgil writes : . . . facilis descensus Averno," 

 but Virgil never tried to descend this Plutonian Tenaya 

 Canon. 



At about six in the evening, two and a half hours since 

 the sun sank behind the cafion wall, I reached a point 

 where, sitting down to rest on a sixty-foot precipice, two 

 hundred feet above the rushing stream, with my legs 

 hanging over the edge, I thought I had found the first 

 promising place in which to use my rope, the only use 

 for which that I had found so far being as a pillow at 

 night. By availing myself of several short spurs of rock 

 and one small tree, it looked as if I could reach the bed 

 of the river again. The stream, however, at this point at 

 once entered a narrow defile thirty feet wide by three 

 hundred feet high and disappeared from my view. The 

 danger of getting down and neither being able to get 

 back again nor to go ahead down the canon, with dark- 

 ness near at hand, decided me to turn back and descend 



