It was still early in the afternoon, but with a thick mist falling Blackmore thought best to stop where we were. The next available camping place was below the half-mile-long third cascade, and no old river man likes to go into a rapid when the visibility is poor. We pitched the tent in a hole cut out of the thick-growing woods on a low bench at the inner angle of the bend. Everything was soaking wet, but it was well back from the falls, and for the first time in two days we were able to talk to each other without shouting. Not that we did so, however; from sheer force of habit we continued roaring into each other's ears for a week or more yet.
The great pile of logs on top of the flat-topped rock above the whirlpool had fascinated me from the first. Over a hundred feet square, forty feet high, and packed as though by a titanic hydraulic press, it must have contained thousands and thousands of cords of wood. On Blackmore's positive assurance as a timberman that there was nothing in the pile of any value for lumber, even in the improbable contingency that a flood would ever carry it beyond the big drifts of Kinbasket Lake, I decided to make a bonfire of it. Never had I had such an opportunity, both on the score of the sheer quantity of combustible and the spectacular setting for illumination.
The whirlpool was _whouf-whoufing_ greedily as it wolfed the whole cascade when I clambered up just before dark to touch off my beacon. It was fairly dry at the base, and a pile of crisp shavings off a slab from some distant up-river sawmill caught quickly. From a spark of red flickering dimly through the mist when we sat down to supper, this had grown to a roaring furnace by the time we had relaxed to pipes and cigarettes. An hour later the flames had eaten a clear chimney up through the jam and the red light from their leaping tips was beginning to drive back the encompassing darkness. Roos, who had read about India, thought it would have been fine if we only had a few widows to cast themselves on the flaming pyre and commit _suttee_. Andy and Blackmore, both sentimental bachelors, were a unit in maintaining that it would be a shame to waste good widows that way, especially on the practically widowless Big Bend. All three were arguing the point rather heatedly when they crawled into their blankets. For myself, with a vision of the wonder about to unroll impinging on my brain, I could not think of turning in for hours yet.