After Passing A Night In This Valley, The Travellers In The
Morning Scaled The Neighboring Hills, To Look Out For
A more
eligible route than that upon which they had unluckily fallen;
and, after much reconnoitring, determined to make their
Way once
more to the river, and to travel upon the ice when the banks
should prove impassable.
On the second day after this determination, they were again upon
Snake River, but, contrary to their expectations, it was nearly
free from ice. A narrow riband ran along the shore, and sometimes
there was a kind of bridge across the stream, formed of old ice
and snow. For a short time, they jogged along the bank, with
tolerable facility, but at length came to where the river forced
its way into the heart of the mountains, winding between
tremendous walls of basaltic rock, that rose perpendicularly from
the water's edge, frowning in bleak and gloomy grandeur. Here
difficulties of all kinds beset their path. The snow was from two
to three feet deep, but soft and yielding, so that the horses had
no foothold, but kept plunging forward, straining themselves by
perpetual efforts. Sometimes the crags and promontories forced
them upon the narrow riband of ice that bordered the shore;
sometimes they had to scramble over vast masses of rock which had
tumbled from the impending precipices; sometimes they had to
cross the stream upon the hazardous bridges of ice and snow,
sinking to the knee at every step; sometimes they had to scale
slippery acclivities, and to pass along narrow cornices, glazed
with ice and sleet, a shouldering wall of rock on one side, a
yawning precipice on the other, where a single false step would
have been fatal.
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