One day of our stay here was devoted to making the descent to this river.  It is an undertaking compared with which the crossing of the Gemmi on a mule is child’s play.  Fortunately, however, the arduous trip is not absolutely necessary for an appreciation of the immensity and grandeur of the scenery.  On the contrary, one gains a really better idea of these by riding along the brink, and looking down at various points on the sublime expanse.  Nevertheless, a descent into the Canon is essential for a proper estimate of its details, and one can never realize the enormity of certain cliffs and the extent of certain valleys, till he has crawled like a maimed insect at their base and looked thence upward to the narrowed sky.  Yet such an investigation of the Canon is, after all, merely like going down from a balloon into a great city to examine one of its myriad streets, since any gorge we may select for our descending path is but a tiny section of a labyrinth.  That which is unique and incomparable here is the view from the brink; and when the promised hotel is built upon the border of the Canon, visitors will be content to remain for days at their windows or on the piazzas, feasting their souls upon a scene always sublime and sometimes terrible.

[Illustration:  A VISION OF SUBLIMITY.]

Nevertheless, desirous of exploring a specimen of these chasms (as we often select for minute examination a single painting out of an entire picture gallery) we made the descent to the Colorado by means of a crooked scratch upon a mountain side, which one might fancy had been blazed by a zigzag flash of lightning.  As it requires four hours to wriggle down this path, and an equal amount of time to wriggle up, I spent the greater part of a day on what a comrade humorously styled the “quarter-deck of a mule.”  A square, legitimate seat in the saddle was usually impossible, so steep was the incline; and hence, when going down, I braced my feet and lay back on the haunches of the beast, and, in coming up, had to lean forward and clutch the pommel, to keep from sliding off, as a human avalanche, on the head of the next in line.  In many places, however, riding was impossible, and we were compelled to scramble over the rocks on foot.  The effect of hours of this exercise on muscles unaccustomed to such surprises may be imagined; yet, owing to the wonderfully restorative air of Arizona, the next day after this, the severest physical exertion I had ever known, I did not feel the slightest bad result, and was as fresh as ever.  That there is an element of danger in this trip cannot be doubted.  At times the little trail, on which two mules could not possibly have passed each other, skirts a precipice where the least misstep would hurl the traveler to destruction; and every turn of the zigzag path is so sharp that first the head and then the tail of the mule inevitably projects above the abyss, and wig-wags to the mule below.  Moreover, though not a vestige