Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/388

300 this disembarking on some rocky point and climbing a granite pinnacle from which a perfect maze of mountains, streams, and forests, lies extended below; this experience of the deadly attack of "buck-ague" which paralyses our arms as some goat or deer dashes by; and then the inexpressible delight with which we, "stepping down by zigzag paths and juts of pointed rock, came on the shining levels of the lake." We do not wish to hurry our oars. We must take time to look into the heavenly blue of the waters through the foam-streaks left by our advancing prows. We must suspend the oar-dip entirely at times while we gaze dizzied, with strained necks, up, up, thousands of feet, toward "Death and Morning on the Silverhorns." We must study shore and water as we pass slowly by, finding therein ample confirmation of the theory of glacial origin.

This is one of the deepest cañons on earth. Not such another furrow has Time wrought on the face of the Western Hemisphere, at least. At some points the granite walls rise almost vertically six thousand feet from the water's edge. Here, too, soundings of seventeen hundred feet have been necessary to touch bottom. Over a mile and a half of verticality! This surpasses in depth Yosemite, Yellowstone, Columbia, or even Colorado Cañon. As compared with those more familiar wonders, Chelan lacks the incomparable symmetry and completeness of Yosemite; it has not such a multitude of waterfalls and groups of "castled crags" as are seen within the basaltic gates of the Columbia; it does not display that variety of colouring, especially of the lighter and warmer hues, which astonishes the beholder of the Colorado or the Yellow-