Chuar Butte. Once more we were in a narrow
canyon, narrowing by this peak, but a canyon just the same. Soon we
were below a wall we once had photographed from the mouth of the
Little Colorado; then the stream itself came into view and we were
soon anchored beside it. This was the beginning of the Grand Canyon.

CHAPTER XIX

SIGNALLING OUR CANYON HOME

How long we had waited for this view! How many memories it
recalled--and how different it seemed to our previous visit there!
Then, the high water was on, and the turquoise-tinted mineral water of
the Colorado Chiquito was backed up by the turbid flood waters of the
Rio Colorado, forty feet or more above the present level. Now it was a
rapid stream, throwing itself with wild abandon over the rocks and
into the Colorado. There was the same deserted stone hut, built by a
French prospector, many years before, and a plough that he had packed
in over a thirty-mile trail--the most difficult one in all this rugged
region! There was the little grass-plot where we pastured the burro,
while we made a fifteen-mile walk up the bed of this narrow canyon!
What a hard, hot journey it had been! A year and a half ago we sat on
that rock, and talked of the day when we should come through here in
boats! Even then we talked of building a raft, and of loading the
burro on it for a spin on the flood waters. Lucky for us and for the
burro that we didn't! We understand the temper of these waters now.

Cape Desolation, a point of the Painted Desert on the west side of the
Little Colorado, was almost directly above us, 3200 feet high. Chuar
Butte, equally as high and with walls just as nearly perpendicular,
extended on into the Grand Canyon on the right side, making the
narrowest canyon of this depth that we had seen. The Navajo
reservation terminated at the Little Colorado, although nothing but
the maps indicated that we had passed from the land of the Red man to
that of the White. Both were equally desolate, and equally wonderful.
With the entrance of the new stream the canyon changes its southwest
trend and turns directly west, and continues to hold to this general
direction until the northwest corner of Arizona is reached.

But we must be on again! Soon familiar segregated peaks in the Grand
Canyon began to appear. There was Wotan's Throne on the right, and the
"Copper Mine Mesa" on the left. Three or four miles below the junction
a four-hundred foot perpendicular wall rose abov