Looking solemn, head boatman Rist gives his final harangue of the trip.

“Listen!” he begins.

We listen. Don’t hear a damn thing. Sigh of the river maybe, swooning round the next bend. Cicada keening in the dry grass. Faint scream of the sun, ninety-three million miles above. Nothing significant.

“You don’t hear it but it’s there,” he says. “Lava Falls (ten plus).” Mile 179. “It’s always there. Every time we come down this river, there it is. Drops thirty-seven feet in two hundred yards. The greatest rapid in North America. So we’re gonna need help from you people. Anybody who’s hoping to see a disaster, please stay out of sight. All passengers will walk around this one except volunteers. Yes, we’ll need—”

Hands are rising.

“Not yet,” Wally says. “We want everybody to see it first. Anybody who thinks he or she wants to ride through Lava has to get down there and walk below it and look up through the waves. Then you decide if you really want to do it. We want people who can handle the oars, who can help right the boat if it flips and who can climb around on wet boulders if necessary. Nobody has to do it but I’ll tell you this much: when you’re out there in the middle of Lava, it’s nice to hear another heart beating besides your own. But nobody has to do it. Nobody has to prove anything—to himself or us. OK? From everybody else, we ask maximum moral support, as before, only more so. After Lava we’ll have a party. Any questions?”

Commander Wally’s briefing. Tapestry Wally. You’d think we were in a U-boat about to enter a combat zone. Walter Rist—there is something Teutonic about that chap. The straight blond hair. The Nordic nostrils. The sardonic grin. That iron cross, like an amulet, pinned to his life jacket. Yeah, I see through your crude ruse. Nobody has to do it, eh? Not even looking at me he says that. Pretending to talk to everybody but me. Clever, very clever. But you’ve tipped your hand, Rist. I can read you like the writing on the wall, Wally. No thanks. I glance furtively up and down the river, trapped but not yet panicked. Where is that place? That Separation Canyon? That EXIT from this Hall of Horrors?

Salami on rye, potato salad, peanut butter and Ry-Krisp for lunch. Not half bad. It’s all bad. The condemned man revealed no emotion as he ate his lunch. Ironic laughter in the background. No place to hide. All boats shove off, loaded, onto the shining Colorado. Once more into your britches, friends.

At Mile 178 a great black basaltic rock appears, standing silent in the middle of the river. Vulcan’s Anvil, they call it. It looks like a forty-foot tombstone. Staring at it, we hear this weird whimpering noise from midships. Sharky singing his Martian funeral song. Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned.