2 i8 
The Colorado River 
hundred feet, often vertical on one or the other side at the 
water, and even in the upper portions extremely precipitous. 
By the lOth they had reached the mouth of the Little Col¬ 
orado, where White’s imagination had pictured the greatest 
terror of the whole river, and the end of all the dangerous 
part. The walls of this tributary are, as is usually the case, 
the same as those of the main gorge, but the stream itself was 
small, muddy, and saline. Powell walked up it three or four 
miles, having no trouble in crossing it by wading when desira¬ 
ble. He called the new gorge now before him, really only a 
continuation of the one ending with the canyon of the Little 
Colorado, the ‘‘Great Unknown,” and a party some twenty 
years later, emulating the early Spaniards in the art of forget¬ 
ting, called it the same, but it was the Great Unknown only 
once, and that was when Powell on this occasion first faced 
the sublime, unfathomed depths that here lay in his course. 
Only one month’s rations remained as a reliance in this terrible 
passage. Powell says: ‘‘We have an unknown distance yet to 
run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are 
we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; 
what walls rise over the river, we know not. . . . The 
men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely 
this morning; but to me the cheer is sombre and the jests are 
ghastly.” With anxiety and much misgiving they drifted 
on between mile-high cliffs, rising terrace on terrace to the 
very sky itself. Even now, when the dangers are known and 
tested, no man lives who can enter the great chasm for a 
voyage to the other end without feeling anxiety as to the 
result, and the more anxiety he feels, the more probability 
there is that he will pass the barriers safely. Running rapids 
and passing falls by portages and let-downs, they met no 
formidable obstacle till August 14th, when they ran into a 
granite formation, the ‘‘First Granite Gorge.” While the 
gorge was wide above, it grew narrower as the river level was 
approached, till the walls were closer than anywhere farther 
up; and they were ragged and serrated. They had noticed 
that hard rocks had produced bad river, and soft rocks smooth 
water; now they were in a series of rocks harder than any 
