"O-o-o-oh!" sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. "Isn't it fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!"
"That tickly feeling!" exclaimed Isobel. "I often ride up here to the cañon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it's like ants crawling up and down my back."
"O-o-o-oh!" again sighed Genevieve. "It--it so overpowers one!"
"It's sure some cañon," admitted her husband. "That French artist Doré ought to have seen it."
"If only we had a copy of Dante's Inferno to read here on the brink!" she whispered.
"It always reminds me of Coleridge's poem," murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to the sunless sea.
"Fortunately for us, this is a cañon, not a string of measureless caverns," said Blake. "It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows--triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break."
Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her.
"Dear!" she exclaimed, "I did not dream it was so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down--promise me you will not go down!"
"Now, now, little woman," reproached Blake. "What's become of my partner?"
"But baby--? If you should leave him fatherless!"
"Better that than for him to have a father who is a quitter! Just wait, Sweetheart. That break looks much less overwhelming than these sheer cliffs. You know I shall not attempt anything foolhardy. If it is not possible to get down without too great risk, I shall give it up and send for a transit."
"Oh, will you?" exclaimed Isobel, hardly less apprehensive than his wife. "Why not wait anyway until you can send for your transit?"
"Because I cannot triangulate the bottom within half a mile upstream from where the tunnel would have to be located. That roar and the wildness of the water wherever we can see it is proof that it is flowing down a heavy grade. At the point where I triangulated it might be above the level of Dry Mesa, and way below the mesa here at the tunnel site."