men around it was not his fault.  We all felt that short rations were so much ahead of nothing that there was no grumbling.  The volume of water was now nearly double what it had been on the Green, and the force of the rapids was greatly augmented.  Huge boulders on the bottom, which the Green would have turned over only once or twice, here were rolled along, when they started, for many yards sensible to not the eye but to the ear.  This was a distinct feature of Cataract Canyon and shows the declivity to be very great and the boulders to be well worn.  The declivity for a few miles is greater than in Lodore, perhaps the greatest on the river.  Sometimes in Cataract the rumble of these boulders was mistaken for distant thunder.  At one rapid I remember that a rock many feet square was swaying from the current.  After dinner, the boats were lowered over the rapid, fall, cataract, or whatever it might be called, before which we had paused, and then in short order over four more tremendous ones.  When we had run a fifth, in which we received a violent shaking-up, we went into camp on the left bank at the head of another roarer, or pair of them, and hastened to throw off our saturated clothes and put on the dry from out the friendly rubber sacks.  I never before understood the comfort of being dry.  The topographers recorded a good day’s work:  nine miles and eight powerful cataracts.  Cataract, we decided was the proper name for these plunges, for though they were by no means vertical, they were more violent than what is ordinarily called a rapid.  This was one part of the canyons where White, in his imaginary journey, found an easy passage!  The next day Powell took me with him on a climb to the top.  We had little trouble in getting out.  On the way back the Major’s cut-off arm was on the rock side of a gulch we had followed up, and I found it necessary, two or three times, to place myself where he could step on my knee, as his stump had a tendency to throw him off his balance.  Had he fallen at these points the drop would have been four hundred or five hundred feet.  I mention this to show how he never permitted his one-armed condition to interfere with his doing things.  The walls here were eighteen hundred feet, a gain of three hundred feet over the Junction.  While we were away the men below had lowered the boats over two rapids, in one of which the Nell broke loose and went down alone with her cargo on board.  As good fortune will have it, there is frequently an eddy or two at the foot of a rapid and into one of these she ran.  By a desperate exertion of Hillers in swimming she was regained.