At the Little Colorado 
325 
us. So constant was the rush of the descending waters that 
our oars were needed only for guidance. 
Late in the day there came a long straight stretch, at the 
bottom of which the river appeared to vanish. Had any one 
said the course was now underground from that point onward, 
it would have seemed entirely appropriate. In the outer 
world the sun was low, though it had long been gone to us, 
and the blue haze of approaching night was drawing a veil of 
strange uncertainty among the cliffs, while far above, the upper 
portions of the mighty eastern walls, at all times of gorgeous 
hue, were now beautifully enriched by the last hot radiance of 
the western sky. Such a view as this was worth all the labour 
we had accomplished. When the end of this marvellous piece 
of canyon was reached a small river was found to enter on the 
left through a narrow gorge like the main canyon.. It was the 
Little Colorado, and beside it on a sand-bank we stopped for 
the night, having ended one of the finest runs of our experience, 
about eighteen miles with but a single let-down; yet in this 
distance there were eighteen rapids, one of which was about 
two and one half miles long. It was a glorious record, and I 
do not recall another day which was more exhilarating. We 
had arrived at the end of Marble Canyon and the beginning of 
the Grand Canyon, there being nothing to mark the division 
but the narrow gorge of the Little Colorado. In Marble Can¬ 
yon we had found sixty-nine rapids in the sixty-five and one 
half miles, with a total descent of 480 feet. Of these we ran 
sixty, let down by lines five times, and made four portages. 
Here at the mouth of the Little Colorado was the place where 
White’s imagination pictured overwhelming terrors and his 
worst experience in a whirlpool opposite. But in reality the 
Colorado at this particular point is very tame, and when we 
were there the Little Colorado was a lamb. 
Now the Grand Canyon, as named by Powell on his former 
trip, was before us, and soon we were descending through the 
incomparable chasm. Three or four miles below the Little 
Colorado the walls break away, and the canyon has more the 
appearance of a valley hemmed in by beetling cliffs and 
crags which rise up in all directions over 5000 feet, distant 
