g
the shelves and steps and piles of broken rocks.

We start, leading our ponies; a wall upon our left; unknown depths on
our right. At places our way is along shelves so narrow or so sloping
that I ache with fear lest a pony should make a misstep and knock a man
over the cliffs with him. Now and then we start the loose rocks under
our feet, and over the cliffs they go, thundering down, down, the echoes
rolling through distant canyons. At last we pass along a level shelf for
some distance, then we turn to the right and zigzag down a steep slope
to the bottom. Now we pass along this lower canyon for two or three
miles, to where it terminates in the Grand Canyon, as the other ended in
this, only the river is 1,800 feet below us, and it seems at this
distance to be but a creek. Our withered guide, the human pickle, seats
himself on a rock and seems wonderfully amused at our discomfiture, for
we can see no way by which to descend to the river. After some minutes
he quietly rises and, beckoning us to follow, points out a narrow
sloping shelf on the right, and this is to be our way. It leads along
the cliff for half a mile to a wider bench beyond, which, he says, is
broken down on the other side in a great slide, and there we can get to
the river. So we start out on the shelf; it is so steep we can hardly
stand on it, and to fall or slip is to go--don't look to see!

It is soon manifest that we cannot get the ponies along the ledge. The
storms have washed it down since our guide was here last, years ago. One
of the ponies has gone so far that we cannot turn him back until we
find a wider place, but at last we get him off. With part of the men, I
take the horses back to the place where there are a few bushes growing
and turn them loose; in the meantime the other men are looking for some
way by which we can get down to the river. When I return, one, Captain
Bishop, has found a way and gone down. We pack bread, coffee, sugar, and
two or three blankets among us, and set out. It is now nearly dark, and
we cannot find the way by which the captain went, and an hour is spent
in fruitless search. Two of the men go away around an amphitheater, more
than a fourth of a mile, and start down a broken chasm that faces us who
are behind. These walls, that are vertical, or nearly so, are often cut
by chasms, where the showers run down, and the top of these chasms will
be back a distance from the face of the wall, and the bed of the chasm
wil