The temperature was now often 99 degrees F. in the shade, and rowing on the slow current was irksome, so we lashed the boats together and drifted along while the Major in his armchair read aloud selections from Scott, Emerson, and others, whose condensed poetical works and a couple of Bibles were all the literature to be found in the party, as books are heavy and weight was to be avoided.  At times some of the men amused themselves by diving under the boats, swimming around and ahead of them, or surprised a coyote on the bank with a rifle-shot, and otherwise enjoyed the relaxation we had well earned by our toil in Red Canyon.  The river was smooth and deep and about six hundred to eight hundred feet wide.  At the very foot of the valley we made a camp under the shadow of that magnificent and unrivalled portal, the Gate of Lodore, which had been visible to us for many miles; the dark cleft two thousand feet high, through which the river cuts into the heart of the mountains, appearing as solemn and mysterious as the pathway to another world.  From an eminence we could peer into its depths for some distance, and there was no sign of a rapid, but we were not deceived, having posted ourselves by extracts from Jack Sumner’s diary, whose description of “how the waters come down at Lodore” was contained in the frequent repetition of the words, “a hell of foam.”  Lodore, indeed, is almost one continuous rapid for the whole twenty miles of its length, and the passage through it will tax the endurance of any man.  The declivity is the greatest of the whole river with the exception of the First Granite Gorge of the Grand Canyon and a portion of Cataract Canyon.  A diagram of it is given on page 57.  I have space only to describe one or two characteristic incidents.  The current of the river was extraordinarily swift; it must have been in some places nearly twenty miles an hour.  The stream averaged about three hundred feet wide.  The boats in a rapid fairly flew along amidst the foam, plunging and rearing in the “tails” of waves which always terminate rapids of this class.  One day about noon we came shooting down over one of these places, having just run a rather bad rapid, when we saw only a few hundred yards below an ugly looking fall.  The left wall came down very straight into the water and threw a deep shadow over it so that we could not tell exactly what was there.  Opposite was a rocky wooded point, and between the two the river bodily fell away.  Altogether it was a beautiful, though a startling picture.  The whole set of the current was towards this drop with headlong fury.  There were no eddies, no slack water of any kind.  But we could not do such a foolhardy thing as to go into it without knowing what it was and therefore a landing was imperative.  Accordingly we headed for the right bank, and laid to our oars till they bent like straws.  We almost reached the shore.  It was only a few feet away, but the relentless current was hurling us, broadside