da. Their footing was a lap of level not more than
thirty yards in length by ten in breadth, strewn with pebbles and
bowlders, and showing not one spire of vegetation. Above them rose a
precipice, the summit of which they could not see, but which was
undoubtedly a mile in height. Had there been armies or cities over their
heads, they could not have discovered it by either eye or ear.

At their feet was the Colorado, a broad rush of liquid porphyry, swift and
pitiless. By its color and its air of stoical cruelty it put one in mind
of the red race of America, from whose desert mountains it came and
through whose wildernesses it hurried. On the other side of this grim
current rose precipices five thousand feet high, stretching to right and
left as far as the eye could pierce. Certainly never before did
shipwrecked men gaze upon such imprisoning immensity and inhospitable
sterility.

Directly opposite them was horrible magnificence. The face of the fronting
rampart was gashed a mile deep by the gorge of a subsidiary canon. The
fissure was not a clean one, with even sides. The strata had been torn,
ground, and tattered by the river, which had first raged over them and
then through them. It was a Petra of ruins, painted with all stony colors,
and sculptured into a million outlines. On one of the boldest abutments of
the ravine perched an enchanted castle with towers and spires hundreds of
feet in height. Opposite, but further up the gap, rose a rounded
mountain-head of solid sandstone and limestone. Still higher and more
retired, towering as if to look into the distant canon of the Colorado,
ran the enormous terrace of one of the loftier plateaus, its broad, bald
forehead wrinkled with furrows that had once held cataracts. But language
has no charm which can master these sublimities and horrors. It stammers;
it repeats the same words over and over; it can only _begin_ to tell the
monstrous truth.

"Looks like we was in our grave," sighed Glover.

"Liftinant," jerked out Sweeny, "I'm thinkin' we're dead. We ain't livin',
Liftinant. We've been buried. We've no business trying to _walk_."

Thurstane had the same sense of profound depression; but he called up his
courage and sought to cheer his comrades.

"We must do our best to come to life," he said. "Mr. Glover, can nothing
be done with the boat?"

"Can't fix it," replied the skipper, fingering the ragged hole. "Nothin'
to patch it with."

"There are the bearskins," s