This made it toilsome work for us.

The trees had been felled so that they crossed each other in utmost confusion on the steep declivity.

Many of them were very large, and we slid over the great wet trunks, climbed through and under branches, let ourselves down walls of natural rock, tripped and hampered by our accoutrements, till we came to the end of the entanglement at what we supposed was the edge of the river.

To our dismay we found that we had not kept up stream far enough, and that at this point was a sheer precipice some thirty feet high.

We could find no crevices to help us climb down it.