On the 20th, out of thirteen sharp descents, we easily ran twelve, all in a distance of less than seven miles.

The average width of the river was one hundred and twenty-five feet, while the walls rose to over two thousand feet, and at the top the canyon was about a mile and a quarter from brink to brink.
This brought us to Vasey's Paradise, so named after a botanist friend of his, by Powell on the first descent.

It was only a lot of ferns, mosses, and similar plants growing around two springs that issued from the cliffs on the right about seventy-five feet above the river, and rippled in silver threads to the bottom, but as it was the first green spot since leaving the Paria its appearance was striking and attractive to the eye that had been baffled in all directions except above, in a search for something besides red.

Now the narrow, terraced canyon, often vertical on both sides for several hundred feet above the water, grew ever deeper and deeper, two thousand, twenty-five hundred, three thousand feet and more, as the impetuous torrent slashed its way down, till it finally seemed to me as if we were actually sailing into the inner heart of the world.

The sensation on the first expedition, when each dark new bend was a dark new mystery, must have been something to quite overpower the imagination, for then it was not known that, by good management, a boat could pass through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, and survive.