When this plant is in blossom, the whole valley is
tinted by its blue flowers, and looks like the ocean when overcast by a
cloud.
After passing a night in this valley, the travellers in the morning
scaled the neighboring hills, to look out for a more eligible route
than that upon which they had unluckily fallen; and, after much
reconnoitring, determined to make their way once more to the river, and
to travel upon the ice when the banks should prove impassable.
On the second day after this determination, they were again upon Snake
River, but, contrary to their expectations, it was nearly free from ice.
A narrow riband ran along the shore, and sometimes there was a kind of
bridge across the stream, formed of old ice and snow. For a short time,
they jogged along the bank, with tolerable facility, but at length
came to where the river forced its way into the heart of the
mountains, winding between tremendous walls of basaltic rock, that rose
perpendicularly from the water's edge, frowning in bleak and gloomy
grandeur. Here difficulties of all kinds beset their path. The snow was
from two to three feet deep, but soft and yielding, so that the horses
had no foothold, but kept plunging forward, straining themselves by
perpetual efforts. Sometimes the crags and promontories forced them upon
the narrow riband of ice that bordered the shore; sometimes they had to
scramble over vast masses of rock which had tumbled from the impending
precipices; sometimes they had to cross the stream upon the hazardous
bridges of ice and snow, sinking to the knee at every step; sometimes
they had to scale slippery acclivities, and to pass along narrow
cornices, glazed with ice and sleet, a shouldering wall of rock on one
side, a yawning precipice on the other, where a single false step would
have been fatal.
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