down a chasm amidst the deafening roar,
and, with a shriek which went to the
solitary survivor's heart, the poor fellow fell
back and sank into the whirlpool amidst the
mist and spray. White still clung to the
logs, and in a few minutes found himself in
smooth water, floating fast away. It was
nearly night, the provisions had all been
washed away, and the raft seemed to be
coming to pieces. He succeeded, however,
in getting it on to some flat rocks, and
there he sat all night, thinking over his
horrible loneliness, and wishing he had
died with Baker fighting the Indians; but
when he remembered home, he says he
resolved " to die hard, and like a man."

At dawn he strengthened his raft and
once more put off, taking the precaution
of lashing himself to his logs; he passed
over a succession of rapids where the river
must have fallen, he thinks thirty or forty
feet in a hundred yards, and was blocked
with masses of stone; he was whirled about
and thumped and submerged, until at last
the fastenings of the upper end of the raft
gave way and it spread out like a fan; the
rope, however, held him firm, and when
he floated into calmer water he managed
to get upon a rock, and once more contrived
to fasten the logs together.

Some miles below this, he reached the
mouth of another great river, the Chiquito,
more rapid than the San Juan, and where
the current was at right angles to the
main stream: causing a large and dangerous
whirlpool in a black chasm on the
opposite shore. He saw it from a long way
off, but the Colorado current was so strong
that he hoped with his pole to guide him-
self straight. But when he reached the
meeting of the waters, the raft suddenly
stopped, swung round as if balanced on a
point, and was then swept into the
whirlpool; he felt as if all exertion were now
fruitless, dropped his pole and fell back on his
raft, hearing the gurgling water, and
expecting to be plunged into it. He waited for
death with his eyes closed. Presently he felt
a strange swinging motion and found that
he was circling round and round, sometimes
close to the vortex, sometimes thrown
by an eddy to the outer edge. He
remembers looking up and seeing the blue belt
of sky and some red clouds, showing that
it was sunset in the upper world, five
thousand feet or more above him. He
grew dizzy and fancies he must have fainted,
for, when he again became conscious, the
sky had grown dark and night shadows
filled the cañon. Then as he felt the raft

sweeping round in the current, he suddenly
rose on his knees and asked God to help
him. " In my very soul I prayed, God,
if there is a way out of this fearful place
show it to me, take me out!" It was the
only moment, says the narrator who wrote
down what he had heard from White himself,
that the man volunteered any
information; the rest came out only with close
questioning, " but here his somewhat heavy
features quivered, and his voice grew
husky." Suddenly he felt a different
motion in the raft, and, peering into the
dark, found that he had left the whirlpool
at some distance, and that he was in the
smoothest current he had yet seen. One
of his questioners smiled at this part of the
story, and he said with emotion: "It's true,
Bob, and I'm sure God took me out!"

After this the course of the river became
very crooked, with short, sharp turns; the
current was very slow, the flat precipitous
walls were of white sand-rock upon which
the high- water mark showed strongly, forty
feet above. And here it was found afterwards
by barometrical observations, to be nearly
seven thousand feet in height. The deepest
part, in fact, of the cañon is between the
San Juan and the Colorado Chiquito. The
wretched man's clothes were torn to shreds,
he was constantly wet, every noon the sun
blazed down, burning and blistering his
uncovered body. Four days had dragged
on since he had tasted food, hunger seemed
almost to madden him, and as the raft
floated on he sat looking into the water,
longing to jump in and have done with
his misery. On the fifth day he saw a bit of
flat land with some mesquit bushes on it:
a relief after the utter absence of any
living thing; he had seen no plants, nor
animals, nor birds, at that dreary depth.
He managed to land, and ate the green
pods and leaves, but they seemed only to
make him more hungry.

The rocks now became black, an igneous
formation, with occasional breaks in the
wall, and here and there a bush; they were
becoming gradually lower, though he was
unconscious of it He had been six days
without food, it was eleven since he started,
and he was floating on almost without any
sensation, when he heard voices and saw
men beckoning from the shore; a momentary
strength came to him, he pushed towards
them, and found himself among a tribe of
Yampais Indians who have lived for many
years on a strip of alluvial land along the
bottom of the cañon, which is here some-
what wider, and the trail to which, from