Down Tenaya Canon. 



backyard or on the ice bridge as if shot from a gun. I 

 trusted to the Theory of Probabihties, but at intervals all 

 through the night I was abruptly startled from sleep, 

 above the continuous roar of the stream a few feet from 

 my bed, by the ker-whang of a piece of granite on the 

 nearby cobbles of the river bed or the ker-plunk of a 

 fragment on the honeycombed roof of the ice bridge. The 

 ice bridge dropped off a few huge lumps from its edges 

 with disturbing crashes through the night also. 



I was glad when daylight came. Logically I had figured 

 out that I ought to make a dash of reconnoissance under 

 that ice bridge and see if I could not proceed down the 

 cafion on the river bed. Otherwise I must retrace my 

 steps and seek a way over the domes — four thousand feet 

 above me. 



As I hastened along under that overhanging mass it 

 seemed to me, to borrow from the imagery of the ancients, 

 as if the evil spirits of the ice bridge might be saying 

 exultantly to each other: "We've got him now. We've 

 got him now." I finally started down the steep grade, 

 and where progress is often impossible even with extreme 

 agility and risk, and where it is always difficult and 

 dangerous work jumping from polished boulder to pol- 

 ished boulder in the full daylight, where every move 

 is a problem in itself, it was even more so in the half- 

 light under this overshadowing, frozen bulk of drip- 

 ping material at five o'clock that morning, four hours 

 before the rays of the sun had reached the bottom of 

 the gorge. I jumped this way and that, now slipping 

 into the water, now landing safely on the rocks. I got 

 wet from below and drenched from above. I noticed 

 that the under surface of the ice was eaten away in 

 large, hemispherical shaped cavities, and in one place it 

 had been melted to a much greater height — ten or twenty 

 feet perhaps — than elsewhere, and let in a burst of wel- 

 come light; but a very brief glance satisfied my scientific 

 tastes that morning with those frigid drops like cold 

 finger-tips reaching down uncannily and urging me on 



