boats. Two of the smaller rolls containing bedding, or clothing; a
sack of flour, and half of the cameras completed the loads for the
forward compartments. Five or six tin and wooden boxes, filled with
provisions, went into the large compartments under the stern. A box
containing tools and hardware for the inevitable repairs, and the
weightier provisions--such as canned milk and canned meats--went in
first. This served as ballast for the boats. Then the other provisions
followed, the remaining rolls of bedding and tents being squeezed in
on top. This compartment, with careful packing, would hold as much as
two ordinary-sized trunks, but squeezing it all in through the small
hatchway, or opening on top, was not an easy job. One thing we guarded
very carefully from this time on was a waterproofed sack containing
sugar. The muddy water had entered the top of this sack in our upset,
and a liquefied sugar, or brown-coloured syrup, was used in our coffee
and on our breakfast foods after that. It gradually dried out, and our
emptied cups would contain a sediment of mud in the bottom.

Such was our morning routine, although it was not often that
everything was taken from the boats, and it only happened in this case
because we made a portage the night before.

Our work was all undone an hour later, when we came to the sharp
descent known as Hell's Half Mile, A section of a cliff had fallen
from above, and was shattered into a hundred fragments, large and
small; gigantic rocks were scattered on both shores and through the
river bed, not an orderly array of rocks such as that found at Ashley
Falls, but a riotous mass, looking as though they had been hurled from
the sky above. The stripped trunk of an eight-foot tree, with roots
extending over the river, had been deposited by a recent flood on top
of the principal barrier. All this was found about fifty yards below