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 Canyon 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 from the line of the river five or six miles.  On the right were two minor valleys within the canyon called Nancoweap and Kwagunt, named by Powell after the Pai Utes, who have trails coming down into them.*

* Kwagunt was the name of a Pai Ute who said he owned this valley—­that his father, who used to live there, had given it to him.

As we went on, the canyon narrowed again, becoming wilder and grander than ever, and on the 28th, late in the day, we came to the first bad fall in this division, where a portage was necessary, and we made a camp.  A short distance below this camp the granite ran up.  To any one who has been in this chasm with a boat, the term “the granite runs up” has a deep significance.  It means that the First Granite Gorge is beginning, and this First Granite Gorge, in the Kaibab division of the canyon,