n the morning,
following a rounded wall of limestone, for all the world like a
decayed rampart of some ancient city. A wide floor of rock at its
base made beautiful walking to a place where the lofty escarpment
showed exposures of limestone underlying an enormous mass of dark
sandstone, topped by tar-clay. It is a portentous cliff, bearing
a curiously Eastern look, as if some great pyramid had been riven
vertically, and the exposed surface scarred and scooped by the
weather into a multitude of antic hollows, grotesque projections,
and unimaginable shapes. Here, also, the knives of passers-by had
carved numerous autographs, marring the majestic cliff with their
ludicrous incongruity. Are we not all sinners in this way? "John
Jones," cut into a fantastic buttress which would fittingly adorn a
wizard's temple, may be a poor exhibit of human vanity; but, after
all, the real John Jones is more imperishable than the rock, which
seems scaling, anyway, from the top, and may, by and by, carry the
inscriptions with it. It was hard to tear one's self away from such
a wonderful structure as this, the most striking feature of its kind
on the whole river.

Farther on, escarped banks, consisting of boulders and pebbles
imbedded in tenacious clay, rose to a great height, their tops
clothed with rich moss, and wooded with a close growth of pine,
the hollows being full of delicious raspberries, now dead ripe.

By and by we encountered the Long Rapids--Kaukinwauk Powestik--and,
some hours afterwards, entered the Middle Rapid--Tuwao Powestik--the
worst we had yet come to, full of boulders and sharp rocks, with a
strong current. Very dexterous management was required here on the
part of steersman and bowman; a snapt line or a moment's neglect,
and a swing to broadside would have followed, and spelled ruin.

It was evening before this rapid was surmounted, and all hands,
dog-tired with the long day's pull, were glad to camp at the foot
of the Boiler Rapid, the next in our ascent, and so called from
the wrecking of a scow containing a boiler for one of the Hudson's
Bay Company's steamers. It was the most uncomfortable of camps,
the night being close, and filled with the small and bloodthirsty
Athabasca mosquito, by all odds the most vicious of its kind.
This rapid is strewn with boulders which show above water, making
it a very "nice" and toilsome thing to steer and track a boat
safely over it, but the tracking path itself is stony and fi