next day was a drop of about twenty feet in twenty yards; a sharp plunge of the river in one mass.  As it seemed free from rocks in the middle a run was decided on.  We therefore pulled squarely into it.  On both sides the river was beaten to solid foam amongst the rocks, but in the middle, where we were, there was a clean chute, followed by a long tail of ugly waves.  We were entirely successful, though the waves broke over my head till they almost took my breath away.  The walls reached a height of twenty-five hundred feet, seeming to us almost perpendicular on both sides.  It was the narrowest deep chasm we had yet seen, and beneath these majestic cliffs we ourselves appeared mere pigmies, creeping about with our feeble strength to overcome the tremendous difficulties.  The loud reverberation of the roaring water, the rugged rocks, the toppling walls, the narrow sky, all combined to make this a fearful place, which no pen can adequately describe.  Another day the Major and I climbed out, reaching an altitude, some distance back from the brink, 3135 feet above the river.  The day after this climb the walls ran up to about twenty-seven hundred feet, apparently in places absolutely vertical, though Stanton, who came through here in 1890, said he did not think they were anywhere perpendicular to the top.  The tongue of a bend we found always more or less broken, but in the curve the cliffs certainly had all the effect of absolute perpendicularity, and in one place I estimated that if a rock should fall from the brink it would have struck on or near our boat.  This shows, at any rate, that the walls were very straight.  The boats seemed mere wisps of straw by comparison, and once when I saw one which had preceded ours, lying at the end of a clear stretch, I was startled by the insignificance of the craft on which our lives depended.  Beaman tried to take some photographs which should give this height in full, but the place was far beyond the power of any camera.  In this locality there seemed to be no possibility of a man’s finding a way to the summit.  I concluded that at high water this part of Cataract Canyon would probably annihilate any human being venturing into it, though it is possible high water would make it easier.  Where there was driftwood it was in tremendous piles, wedged together in inextricable confusion; hundreds of tree-trunks, large and small, battered and cut and limbless, with the ends pounded into a spongy lot of splinters.  The interstices between the large logs were filled with smaller stuff, like boughs, railroad-ties, and pieces of dressed timber which had been swept away from the region above the Union Pacific Railway.  Picture this narrow canyon twenty-seven hundred feet deep, at high water, with a muddy booming torrent at its bottom, sweeping along logs and all kinds of floating debris, and then think of being in there with a boat!