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, less than fifty miles in length as the stream runs, contains the
wildest, swiftest, steepest piece of river on this continent except a
portion in Cataract Canyon. The declivity is tremendous. Be