river dropped down considerably at this point, and a break or two permitted us to climb up as high as we cared to go on the red sandstone wall, which had lost its level character, and now rose in a steep slope over a thousand feet above us.  These walls, with no growth but the tussocks of bunch-grass, the prickly pear cactus, the mescal, and the yucca, were more destitute of growth than any we had seen, excepting the upper end of Desolation Canyon, even the upper walls lacking the growth of pinon pine and juniper which we usually associated with them.  We were now directly below the Painted Desert, which lay to the left of the canyon, and no doubt a similar desert was on the right-hand side, in the form of a narrow plateau; but we had no means of knowing just how wide or narrow this was, before it raised again to the forest-covered Buckskin Mountains and the Kaibab Plateau.

The rapid below our camp was just as bad as its roar, we found, on running it the next day.  Most of the descent was confined to a violent drop at the very beginning, but there was a lot of complicated water in the big waves that followed.  Emery was thrown forward in his boat, when he reached the bottom of the chute, striking his mouth, and bruising his hands, as he dropped his oars and caught the bulkhead.  An extra oar was wrenched from the boat and disappeared in the white water, or foam that was as nearly white as muddy water ever gets.  I nearly upset, and broke the pin of a rowlock, the released oar being jerked from my hand, sending me scrambling for an extra oar, when the boat swept into a swift whirlpool.  Emery caught my oar as it whirled past him; the other was found a half-mile below in an eddy.

Some of the rapids in the centre of Marble Canyon were not more than 75 feet wide, with a corresponding violence of water.  The whirlpools in the wider channels below these rapids were the strongest we had seen, and had a most annoying way of holding the boats just when we thought we had evaded them.  Sometimes there would be a whirlpool on either side, with a sharply defined line of division in the centre, along which it was next to impossible to go without being caught on one side or the other.  These whirlpools were seldom regarded as serious, for our boats were too wide and heavy to be readily overturned in them, although we saved ourselves more than one upset by throwing our weight to the opposite side.  A small boat would have upset.  On two occasions we were caught in small whirlpools, where a point of rock projected from the shore, turning upstream, splitting a swift current and making a very rapid and difficult whirl, where the boats were nearly smashed against the walls.  Below all such places were the familiar boils, or fountains, or shoots, as they are variously termed.  These are the lower end of the whirlpools, emerging often from the quiet water below a rapid with nearly as much violence as they disappeared in the rapids above.  These would often rise when