As it did so a tremendous reverberation gathered and broke out, ran up and down the canyon, up the opposite cliff face, echoing and rising as dense and thick as smoke does.

The rack-rock charge, of no one may know how many hundreds of pounds, had done its work.
And then all earth went back to chaos.

A new world was in the making.
There arose in that narrow, iron-sided gorge a havoc such as belike surpassed that of the original breaking through of the waters.

That first slow work of nature might have been done drop by drop, a little at a time.

But now all the outraged river was venting itself in one epochal instant.