twenty-five feet, while the walls rose to over two thousand feet, and at the top the canyon was about a mile and a quarter from brink to brink.  This brought us to Vasey’s Paradise, so named after a botanist friend of his, by Powell on the first descent.  It was only a lot of ferns, mosses, and similar plants growing around two springs that issued from the cliffs on the right about seventy-five feet above the river, and rippled in silver threads to the bottom, but as it was the first green spot since leaving the Paria its appearance was striking and attractive to the eye that had been baffled in all directions except above, in a search for something besides red.  Now the narrow, terraced canyon, often vertical on both sides for several hundred feet above the water, grew ever deeper and deeper, two thousand, twenty-five hundred, three thousand feet and more, as the impetuous torrent slashed its way down, till it finally seemed to me as if we were actually sailing into the inner heart of the world.  The sensation on the first expedition, when each dark new bend was a dark new mystery, must have been something to quite overpower the imagination, for then it was not known that, by good management, a boat could pass through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, and survive.  Down, and down, and ever down, roaring and leaping and throwing its spiteful spray against the hampering rocks the terrible river ran, carrying our boats along with it like little wisps of straw in the midst of a Niagara, the terraced walls around us sometimes fantastically eroded into galleries, balconies, alcoves, and Gothic caves that lent to them an additional weird and wonderful aspect, while the reverberating turmoil of the ever-descending flood was like some extravagant musical accompaniment to the extraordinary panorama flitting past of rock sculpture and bounding cliffs.

The 22d was a day to be particularly remembered, for the walls, though more broken at the water’s edge, were now some thirty-five hundred feet high and seemed to be increasing by leaps and bounds, for at one place, through a side gorge on the right, we could discern cliffs so far above our heads that tall pine trees looked no larger than lead pencils.  It was the end of the Kaibab, whose summit was more than five thousand feet higher than the river at this point.  Cataract followed rapid and rapid followed cataract as we were hurled on down through the midst of the sublimity, which, parting at our advance, closed again behind like some wonderful phantasmagoria.  At times in the headlong rush the boats could barely be held in control.  Once, a wild mass of breakers appeared immediately in the path of our boat, from which it was impossible to escape, even though we made a severe effort to do so.  We thought we were surely to be crushed, and I shall not forget the seconds that passed as we waited for the collision which never came, for when the boat dashed into the midst of the spray, there was no shock whatever; we glided through as if on oil,—­the rocks were too far beneath the surface to harm us.  So constant was the rush of the descending waters that our oars were needed only for guidance.