the river and the canyon is like a great valley with
perpendicular walls removed for several miles on either side of the
river, and rising to a height of five thousand feet. Before us lay the
great gorge, where the river seemed to lose itself in granite gloom as
it wound downwards.

"Let's make a camp in this valley," suggested Jim, "and do some climbing
before we take our last sprint down the river."

"I guess it will be our last too," groaned Tom, gloomily.

"Oh shut up!" commanded Jim wearily, giving him a kick with his
moccasined foot. "You ought to have lived in the times of Jeremiah."

"You ought to have lived in the Stone Age," retorted Tom, "it would have
just suited you."

We made camp near a pleasant looking green stretch of shore and on the
following day we started out on our little picnic excursion that
consumed several days.

It would take another book to describe what we saw on that trip. After
some remarkably hard work and interesting climbing we reached the rim of
the canyon, some six thousand feet above the Colorado, that seemed but a
narrow rivulet and its long familiar roar was reduced to a gentle purr
of sound.

We saw below and around us one of the unequalled panoramas of the world.
Back of us was the black plateau of the great forest land, called the
"Kaibab," covered with pines, and beneath our feet was the Grand Canyon
itself. Twelve miles from rim to rim and in the chasm were towers,
pinnacles, terraced plateaus, palaces and temples, and in the distance,
faint and fair formations of beauty and of light.

The coloring was the most wonderful of all. Deep down and far away was
the purple gneiss of the gorge, ribboned with granite, then on either
side of the river rose the various architectural forms and structures of
the canyon.

Based on purple, then a wonderful brown; widest of all the rich red of
the sandstone, while the highest pinnacles, peaks and plateaus had a
coping of white limestone to correspond with the eight hundred feet of
the same rock just below the rim.

But who shall tell of the glories of the sunset as the light fades from
the white of the western wall and the vast, vast canyon is filled with
the purple shadows!

"Wouldn't it jar you?" exclaimed Jim, the first to break the awestruck
silence that bound us, when its immensity first came under our eyes.

"Yes," said Tom, "if you stepped off it would."

Without foreboding, but with grim determination, we left our plea