it--the ultimate meaning of things. To be sure, when you open your eyes
again, it's all gone--the storm-flung rainbows seem to hide it again.

A mile below, we came upon the Crooked Falls of twenty feet. Leaving the
left bank and running almost parallel with it for some three hundred
yards, then turning and making a horseshoe, and returning to the right
bank almost opposite the place of first observation, this fall is nearly
a mile in length, being an unbroken sheet for that distance. This one,
also, does nothing at all, and in a beautifully irregular way. Somehow
it made me think of Walt Whitman! But we left it soon, swinging out
into the open parched country. We knew all this turbulence to be merely
the river's bow before the great stunt.

As we swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the
cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the
roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew
up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud!
For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders
increased--like the undertone of the surf when the sea whitens. We were
approaching the Great Falls of the Missouri. There were no sign posts in
that lonesome tract; no one of whom to ask the way. Little did we need
direction. The voice of thunder crying in the desert led us surely.

A half-hour more of clambering over shale-strewn gullies, up sun-baked
watercourses, and we found ourselves toiling up the ragged slope of a
bluff; and soon we stood upon a rocky ledge with the thunders beneath
us. Damp gusts beat upward over the blistering scarp of the cliff. I lay
down, and crawling to the edge, looked over. Two hundred feet below
me--straight down as a pebble drops--a watery Inferno raged, and
far-flung whirlwinds all but exhausted with the dizzy upward reach,