Preserved Flour 
255 
the cargoes were again taken out and carried over the rocks 
down to a quiet bay. This took till very late and every one 
was tired out, but the boats were carried and pushed on 
skids up over the rocks for twenty or thirty yards, past the 
worst of the fall, and then lowered into the water to be let 
down the rest of the way by lines. Two had to be left there 
till the following day. We had found a one hundred pound 
sack of flour lying on a high rock, where it had been placed 
at the time of the wreck of the No-Name^ and Andy that 
day made our dinner biscuits out of it. Though it was 
two years old the bread tasted perfectly good; and this is a 
tribute to the climate, as well as to the preservative qualities 
of a coating of wet flour. This coating was about half an inch 
thick, and outside were a cotton flour-sack and a gunny bag. 
The flour was left on the rock and may be there yet. Not far 
below this we came to Lower Disaster Falls, which a short 
portage enabled us to circumnavigate and go on our way. 
The current was so swift all the time that objects on shore 
flitted past as they do when one looks from a window of a rail¬ 
way train. Just opposite our camp on this night the cliff was 
almost perpendicular from the water’s edge to the height of 
about twenty-five hundred feet. The walls seemed very close 
together, only a narrow strip of sky being visible. As we sat 
after supper peering aloft at this ribbon of the heavens, the 
stars in the clear sky came slowly out like some wonderful 
transformation scene, and just on the edge of the opposite wall, 
resembling an exquisite and brilliant jewel, appeared the con¬ 
stellation of the Harp. Immediately the name “Cliff of the 
Harp “ suggested itself and from that moment it was so called. 
Here and there we discovered evidences of the former jour¬ 
ney, but nothing to indicate that human beings had ever before 
that been below Disaster Falls. There we saw the same indi¬ 
cations of an early disaster which Powell had noticed on the 
first trip, a rusty bake-oven, some knives and forks and tin 
plates, in the sand at the foot of the second fall. The day 
after the Cliff of the Harp camp we began by making a line- 
portage around a very ugly place, which took the whole morn¬ 
ing. In the afternoon there was another similar task, so that 
