On the next day they were startled by the sudden closing in of the walls, till the canyon, now nearly three thousand feet deep, became very narrow, with the river filling the chasm from one blank cliff to the other.

The water was also swift and the canyon winding, so that it was not possible to see ahead.

Powell was much disturbed lest they should run upon some impassable fall, but luckily in about a mile and a half they emerged again into a more broken gorge without having had the least difficulty.

He justly remarks that after it was done it seemed a simple thing to run through such a place, but the first doing of it was fraught with keen anxiety.

In the late afternoon of this same day, they came to the end of the forty-one miles of Cataract Canyon, marked by a deep canyon-valley entering from the left at a sharp bend where millions of crags, pinnacles, and towers studded the summit of the right-hand wall, now again thirteen hundred feet high.