In the bush, one's view was broken by rocks and trunks, but from the wide expanse of water one could look across the belt of forest that ran back, desolate and silent, to Hudson Bay.

Here and there the hazy outline of a rocky height caught the eye, but for the most part, the landscape had no charm of varied beauty.

It was monotonous, somber, and forbidding.
The canoe was now thirty or forty yards from the rough bank, and drifting fast.

Driscoll obviously meant to land on a patch of shingle lower down, which was the only safe spot for some distance.

At low-water one could run a canoe aground among the ledges that bordered the slack inner edge of the rapid, but when the Shadow rose in flood the current broke and boiled furiously among the rocks.