than itself. That
would have been sufficient for most moods, but, resting on the edge of
a pass ten thousand six hundred feet high, we concluded that we surely
would have to look over into Nevada.

We got out the map. It became evident, after a little study, that by
descending six thousand feet into a box canon, proceeding in it a few
miles, and promptly climbing out again, by climbing steadily up the
long narrow course of another box canon for about a day and a half's
journey, and then climbing out of that to a high ridge country with
little flat valleys, we would come to a wide lake in a meadow eleven
thousand feet up. There we could camp. The mountain opposite was
thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty feet, so the climb from the
lake became merely a matter of computation. This, we figured, would
take us just a week, which may seem a considerable time to sacrifice to
the gratification of a whim. But such a glorious whim!

We descended the great box canon, and scaled its upper end, following
near the voices of a cascade. Cliffs thousands of feet high hemmed us
in. At the very top of them strange crags leaned out looking down on
us in the abyss. From a projection a colossal sphinx gazed solemnly
across at a dome as smooth and symmetrical as, but vastly larger than,
St. Peter's at Rome.

The trail labored up to the brink of the cascade. At once we entered a
long narrow aisle between regular palisaded cliffs.

The formation was exceedingly regular. At the top the precipice fell
sheer for a thousand feet or so; then the steep slant of the debris,
like buttresses, down almost to the bed of the river. The lower parts
of the buttresses were clothed with heavy chaparral, which, nearer
moisture, developed into cottonwoods, alders, tangled vines, flowers,
rank grasses. And away on the very edge of the cliffs, close under the
sky, were pines, belittled by distance, solemn and aloof, like Indian
warriors wrapped in their blankets watching from an eminence the
passage of a hostile force.

We caught rainbow trout in the dashing white torrent of the river. We
followed the trail through delicious thickets redolent with perfume;
over the roughest granite slides, along still dark aisles of forest
groves, between the clefts of boulders so monstrous as almost to seem
an insult to the credulity. Among the chaparral, on the slope of the
buttress across the river, we made out a bear feeding. Wes and I sat
ten minutes