The river, which in that fantastic stretch seemed not great but actually puny, had somehow during the ages cut its narrow brown way straight through vast rock mountains, which rose vertically from the water for hundreds of feet, then, falling back at knee-, hip-, and shoulder-terraces, rose again, and again, and again, all but perpendicular, until, seen through sudden clefts, they reached craggy pinnacles, like those of the Tetons, far up in the springtime sky. Sometimes the sky was cloud-streaked, and more than once we saw, back in the tallest ranges, a needle of rock piercing the underside of a layer of mist, and then, higher up, its point, visible and dry and gray in clear air above the thin plate of vapor. The rocks were limestone with overlying sandstone, and at the riverfront, where the softer rock had been washed away leaving the limestone sheer and upright, there were enormous up-and-down potholes in the faces of the cliffs, giving them weird, fluted surfaces. Caves could be seen high on the cliffs. Here and there villages clung to ledges, and sometimes these blue-gray hamlets straddled, with lovely high-arching bridges, little foaming bourns—one of which, I recall, poured out of the mouth of a cavern far up the side of a peak.

Going through Witches’ Mountain Gorge gave me the feeling, as in the song Old Pebble had sung in the rapids of Hsintan, of skimming a thousand years in a day.

The water of the river itself was mostly deep and relatively quiet, but here and there, where jagged cliffs jutted boldly forward, or where heaps of detritus had been thrown out from streams on the banks, or where piles of enormous, square-cornered, house-sized blocks of sooty rock, which looked as if they had been blackened in a mountain-builder’s furnace, had tumbled from the crags down into the sides of the channel—in such places there were eddies and cross-sets and whirlpools of unexpected violence. What a setting for a dam!