of the sea. Having finished our meal, we launched the barge and rapidly descended the river, which was now swollen many feet above its usual level. Did not more serious avocations call him away, an admirer of Nature would willingly linger in a region like this. The volcanic and basaltic islands—the range of picturesque mountains, whose bases came to bathe in the river, whilst their summits seemed to be struggling, in the giant efforts of the avalanche, to throw off the winding-sheet of winter, in order to give place to the new and beautiful verdure of the month of May, with its smiling and varied flowers—the thousand fountains which we could at one view behold, {214} leaping out with soothing music from the shelves of perpendicular rocks bordering the river—all lent their aid to increase the beauty of the scenery of Nature, which, in this region of the Columbia, seems to have put forth all her energy to display her grandeur and magnificence.
After some hours of descent we came to Martin's rapid, where a Canadian, so called, together with his son, found a watery grave. Its roar is deafening, and the agitation of the water resembles that of a raging sea-storm. The whole bed of the river is here strewed with immense fragments of rocks. Guided by an expert Iroquois pilot, and aided with ten oars, the boat darted over its boisterous surface, dancing-like and leaping from wave to wave, with the rapidity of lightning.
At sunset we were at the Dalle of the Dead. (Dalle is an old French word, meaning a trough, and the name is given by the Canadian voyageurs to all contracted running waters, hemmed in by walls of rocks.) Here, in 1838, twelve unfortunate travellers were buried in the river.[157] The waters are compressed between a range*
