his sleeping camp with rifle balls. At night we secreted our camps in thickets of carrizo, a kind of cane which grew on the low sand banks, and each man slept with a loaded Winchester beneath his pillow.

The second morning we reached the appropriately named village of Polvo ("dust"), the last settlement for 150 miles. It consists of half a dozen dreary adobe houses on a mud bank, the remains of the old United States military post of Fort Leaton. Here the hospitable storekeeper, an agreeable white man who for some unknown reason had chosen this dreary place of exile, entertained us by showing us the splotches of blood upon the floor and wall behind his counter, where his predecessor had been robbed and murdered the year before, supposedly by Alvarado and his friends. Before I saw this gruesome sight I had not entertained sufficient respect for MacMahon's precautions. Thereafter I was more careful to keep my firearms handy. While at this store, remarks were made by some of my men which led me to suspect that they were secretly planning to retaliate upon Alvarado. Here was a possible motive for undertaking a journey the dangers of which they depicted in vigorous terms. In vain I protested that this expedition was for scientific purposes, and not for vengeance. They only replied that they would shoot Alvarado on sight 66 like any other varmint."

A few miles below Polvo the huge chocolate-colored cliffs and domes of the Bofecillos Mountains began to overhang the river, and before night we entered the first of the series of canyons of the Rio Grande, in which we were to be entombed for the succeeding weeks. This bears the cheerful name of Murderers Canyon, for here, a year or two before, the body of a supposed victim of Alvarado was found lodged on a sand bar. This and the Fresno Canyon, a few miles below, are vertical cuts about 600 feet deep through massive walls of red volcanic rock. All the other canyons are of massive limestone. The rocks are serrated into vertical columns of jointed structure, and when touched by the sunlight become a golden yellow. The sky line is a ragged crest, with many little side canyons nicking the profile. When evening came we were glad to camp on a narrow bank of sandy silt between the river and its walls. Lying upon our backs and relieved of the concentration of our wits upon the cares of navigation, we were able to study and appreciate the beauties of this wild gorge.

In

The river itself, here as everywhere, is a muddy, yellow stream. places, patches of fine white silt form bordering sand bars; about 25 feet above these there is a second bench, covered by a growth of darkgreen mesquite. The whole is inclosed by vertically steep, jointed rock walls. The thread of water and the green ribbon of the mesquite bench are refreshing sights, for immediately above the latter, on both sides, the desert vegetation always sets in.

Toward sunset I scaled a break in the canyon to reach the upland and obtain a lookout. Above the narrow alluvial bench forming the green ribbon of river verdure I suddenly came upon the stony, soilless hills forming the matrix out of which the valley is cut, glaring in the brilliant sunshine and covered with the mocking desert flora. The sight of this aridity almost within reach of the torrent of life-giving waters below, the blessing of which it was never to receive, was shocking and repulsive. It also recalled a danger which ever after haunted us.

Should we lose our boats and escape the canyons, what

chance for life should we have in crossing these merciless, waterless wastes of thorn for a hundred miles or more to food and succor?

Below the mouth of Murderers Canyon the rapids were unusually bad and dangerous, and it required all hands but one, who stood guard with cocked rifle, to wade beside the boats and preserve them from destruction. As this canyon suddenly ends, its vertical walls continue north and south, as the front of the mountain which it has crossed. We then entered a valley which presents a beautiful panorama of desert form and color. The hills are of all sizes and shapes. Those on the outer border are dazzlingly white, chalky rocks, surmounted here and there by black caps of volcanic rock. The slopes are vermilion foothills of red clay. Still lower are the river terraces of the desert yellow clay and gravel, the whole threaded by the narrow fringe of fresh green along the river.

In this wild country lived the notorious Alvarado. Only a most fortunate mistake prevented my men from carrying out their threat to exterminate this bandit. Alvarado had a surname as well as a Christian name, and when they were told that the next ranch down the river was Ordonez's, they did not understand that this was another name for Alvarado until after we had passed him with an infant in his arms, serenely watching us float down the stream. I breathed easier on finding this out, but the men swore audibly and long at their misfortune in not recognizing the supposed monster.

Still lower down the river this region becomes more weird. Immediately adjacent to the stream there are great bluffs of a dirty yellow volcanic tufa, which weather into many fantastic, curvilinear forms. One of these, 200 feet high, stands out conspicuously from its surroundings, an almost perfect reproduction of the Egyptian Sphinx. This, with the sterility of the surroundings and the dirty mud colors, constantly recalled the character of the Nile.

We were relieved to see before us the entrance of another vertical "shut-out," or canyon, into which we passed at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and found a suitable camping ground, hemmed in on each side by vertical walls and out of rifle range from above. This canyon was only a mile or two long, and was very similar to Murderers Canyon in its scenic and geologic features.

The next day the river followed a sinuous course through a most picturesque district, which we named the Black Rock Canyon. This was a widely sloping, terraced canyon cut 1,000 feet below the summit of a level plateau. The edges of this plateau were lozenged by erosion into symmetrical buttes with great flat caps and scarp lines above terraced slopes, the graceful curves of which wound back and forth from the river's edge. The tabled tops and lower slopes of these buttes were thick strata of dazzling white chalk, while between them was an immense bed of black lava, which always occupied the same relative position between the white bands, as if kind nature had painted a stripe of black about the hills to break the monotony of the desert glare. All day we wound through these hills, now beneath vast bluffs at the water's edge, and then again in more open places, each revealing a new and more beautiful vista.

Toward evening a graceful sweep of the river brought us into a more open basin opposite the mouth of the San Carlos Creek. This stream, which can barely be said to flow, comes in from the Mexican side, and is the only flowing tributary of the Rio Grande that we

passed between the Conchos and the Pecos. Near its head waters, in the wild and rugged San Carlos Mountains, is a little settlement of Indians, the remnant of a once famous, desperate tribe, from which the creek and the mountains take their names. Opposite is a wide, sloping plain of limestone, from the center of which rises a wonderful symmetrical butte a thousand feet high, the summit of which is a head presenting the profile of an old man, which we named the Sentinel, from the watch which it kept over the entrance of the Grand Canyon. We traveled fully 100 miles to this point by river, but as the crow flies it is only about 50 miles below Presidio. We camped upon the Texas side, beneath a limestone bluff. A mile below us down the river was a vast mountain wall, the vertical escarpment of which ran directly north and south across the path of the river, and through which the latter cuts its way. The river disappears in a narrow vertical slit in the face of the escarpment. This mountain is the Sierra Santa Helena, and the rift in its face is the entrance to the so-called Grand Canyon of the Rio Grande. Why this particular canyon is called "grand" is not known, for many of the canyons below were not only as deep, but far longer and in every way equally deserving of the name. But Texas

is poor in topographic names; most of the features are without names at all. This was the case even with the great mountain through which this canyon passed. Later the Mexicans told us that the feature was called the Sierra de Santa Helena, and this particular canyon will be spoken of as the Grand Canyon de Santa Helena.

The Sierra de Santa Helena is an elongated, quadrangular mountain block half a mile high, 12 miles wide, and 50 miles long, and lies directly across the path of the river. Its summit is a plane surface, slightly tilted to the west. The edges are precipitous scarps. Imagine this block cut through vertically with the finest saw, and the rift of the saw will represent the canyon of the river.

Before entering the canyon, let us look at it as did Dr. G. G. Parry, of the Mexican boundary survey, who, deeming it impassable, climbed the heights and saw it from above. The general surface of the plateau presents no indication of a river course, and you are not aware of its presence till you stand suddenly on its abrupt brink. Even here the running water is not always visible, unless advantage be taken of the projecting points that form angles along the general course of the river. From this dizzy height the stream below looks like a mere thread, passing in whirling eddies or foaming over broken rapids; and a stone hurled from above into this chasm passes completely out of sight behind the overhanging ledges. From the point formed by its last projecting ledges the view is grand beyond all conception. You can here trace backward the line of the immense chasm which marks the course of the river till it emerges from its stupendous outlet.

The next morning, after the customary involuntary wetting at the rapids, by which we made our nightly camps, we rowed straight for the narrow slit in the mountain. The river makes a sudden bend as it enters the canyon, and almost in the twinkling of an eye we passed out of the desert glare into the dark and silent depths of its gigantic walls, which rise vertically from the water's edge to a narrow ribbon of sky above. Confined in a narrow channel less than 25 feet wide, without bench or bank upon which to land, our boats glided along without need of oars, as we sat in admiration of the superb precipices which hemmed us in on each side. The solemnity of the scene was