108 EXPLORATION OF THE CANONS OF THE COLOKADO. 
below is covered with a sea of vapor a billowy, raging, noiseless sea and 
as the vapory flood still rolls up from the south, great waves dash against the 
foot of the cliffs and roll back; another tide conies in, is hurled back, and 
another and another, lashing the cliffs until the fog rises to the summit, and 
covers us all. 
There is a heavy pine and fir forest above, beset with dead and fallen 
timber, and we make our way through the undergrowth to the east. 
It rains ! The clouds discharge their moisture in torrents, and we make 
for ourselves shelters of boughs, which are soon abandoned, and we stand 
shivering by a great fire of pine logs and boughs, which we have kindled, 
but which the pelting storm half extinguishes. 
One, two, three, four hours' of the storm, and at last it partially abates. 
During this time our animals, which we have turned loose, have sought 
for themselves shelter under the trees, and two of them have wandered away 
beyond our sight. I go out to follow their tracks, and come near to the 
brink of a ledge of rocks, which, in the fog and mist, I suppose to be a little 
ridge, and I look for a way by which I can go down. Standing just here, 
there is a rift made in the fog below, by some current or blast of wind, which 
reveals an almost bottomless abyss. I look from the brink of a great preci 
pice of more than two thousand feet; but, through the mist, the forms below 
are half obscured, and all reckoning of distance is lost, and it seems ten 
thousand feet, ten miles any distance the imagination desires to make it. 
Catching our animals, we return to the camp. We find that the little 
streams which come down from the plateau are greatly swollen, but at camp 
they have had no rain. The clouds which drifted up from the south, striking 
against the plateau, were lifted up into colder regions, and discharged their 
moisture on the summit, and against the sides of the plateau, but there was 
no rain in the valley below. 
September 9. We make a fair start this morning, from the beautiful 
meadow at the head of the Kanab, and cross the line of little hills at the 
headwaters of the Rio Virgen, and pass, to the south, a pretty valley, and 
at ten o'clock come to the brink of a great geographic bench a line of cliffs. 
Behind us are cool springs, green meadows, and forest clad slopes; below 
us, stretching to the south, until the world is lost in blue haze, is a painted 
