portage to Celilo. The outlook, fortunately, is a good one; and we travel right along the river-bank nearly the whole distance.
What a strange scene it is! Sand, rock, and water—not uncommon elements in a pleasing picture; but here it is not pleasing—it is uncanny to a degree. We catch ourselves wondering how deep here must be a stream only forty yards wide, which in other places is two thousand yards wide, and deep enough to float any kind of a ship; for we can not help fancying that what the river here lacks in breadth it makes up in depth. But we are not aware that soundings have ever been taken in the Dalles.
Boats have gone through this passage. In low-water the barges of the Hudson's Bay Company used to run the Dalles. One or two steamers have been brought through at a low stage of water; but it is a very perilous undertaking—much more perilous than going over the Cascades at high-water. We make our observations, and conclude we should not like to take passage on this particular portion of the Columbia. How it swirls, how it twirls, how it eddies and boils; how it races and chases, how it leaps, how it toils; how one mile it rushes, and another it flows, as soft as a lovesong sung "under the rose;" how in one place it seethes, in another is still, and as smooth as the flume of some sleepy old mill. A rock-entroughed torrent like none else, we pledge; and, in truth, is a river set up on its edge.
