Directly opposite them was horrible magnificence.  The face of the fronting rampart was gashed a mile deep by the gorge of a subsidiary canon.  The fissure was not a clean one, with even sides.  The strata had been torn, ground, and tattered by the river, which had first raged over them and then through them.  It was a Petra of ruins, painted with all stony colors, and sculptured into a million outlines.  On one of the boldest abutments of the ravine perched an enchanted castle with towers and spires hundreds of feet in height.  Opposite, but further up the gap, rose a rounded mountain-head of solid sandstone and limestone.  Still higher and more retired, towering as if to look into the distant canon of the Colorado, ran the enormous terrace of one of the loftier plateaus, its broad, bald forehead wrinkled with furrows that had once held cataracts.  But language has no charm which can master these sublimities and horrors.  It stammers; it repeats the same words over and over; it can only begin to tell the monstrous truth.

“Looks like we was in our grave,” sighed Glover.

“Liftinant,” jerked out Sweeny, “I’m thinkin’ we’re dead.  We ain’t livin’, Liftinant.  We’ve been buried.  We’ve no business trying to walk.”

Thurstane had the same sense of profound depression; but he called up his courage and sought to cheer his comrades.

“We must do our best to come to life,” he said.  “Mr. Glover, can nothing be done with the boat?”

“Can’t fix it,” replied the skipper, fingering the ragged hole.  “Nothin’ to patch it with.”

“There are the bearskins,” suggested Thurstane.

Glover slapped his thigh, got up, danced a double-shuffle, and sat down again to consider his job.  After a full minute Sweeny caught the idea also and set up a haw-haw of exultant laughter, which brought back echoes from the other side of the canon, as if a thousand Paddies were holding revel there.

“Oh! yees may laugh,” retorted Sweeny, “but yees can’t laugh us out av it.”

“I’ll sheath the whole bottom with bearskin,” said Glover.  “Then we can let her grind.  It’ll be an all day’s chore, Capm—­perhaps two days.”

They passed thirty-six hours in this miserable bivouac.  Glover worked during every moment of daylight.  No one else could do anything.  A green hand might break a needle, and a needle broken was a step toward death.  From dawn to dusk he planned, cut, punctured, and sewed with the patience of an old sailor, until he had covered the rent with a patch of bearskin which fitted as if it had grown there.  Finally the whole bottom was doubled with hide, the long, coarse fur still on it, and the grain running from stem to stern so as to aid in sliding over the sand and pebbles of the shallows.

While Glover worked the others slept, lounged, cooked, waited.  There was no food, by the way, but the hard, leathery, tasteless jerked meat of the grizzly bears, which had begun to pall upon them so they could hardly swallow it.  Eating was merely a duty, and a disagreeable one.