The Days of a Man 1878 



Smash mountain. Farther on we splashed across War 

 Woman Creek by way of the " Smash Wagon Ford," 

 noted all through that region; and rightly named 

 it is, for in the middle of the stream one comes to a 

 jutting shelf of rock with a sudden drop of four 

 feet or more. But as there were then no bridges 

 anywhere about, and no other, way around, it was 

 a case of "Hobson's choice." 



Another day still took us through Rabun Gap 

 to the headwaters of the Savannah in Georgia, and 

 so into the finest mountain gorge of the whole Ap- 

 palachian chain, that of the Tallulah, the "terrible 

 river" of the Cherokees. This untamable stream, in 

 a course of three miles of continuous foam and with 

 a total vertical drop of 1400 feet, storms down what 

 I may call a gigantic, irregular staircase (or broken, 

 stratified, inclined plane) of white quartzite in a 

 series of innumerable cascades and five distinct 

 cataracts, cutting meanwhile progressively deeper 

 and deeper into a densely wooded chasm. 



Fails of The several falls, moreover, are quite unlike each 

 o ther in their wild beauty. The three lower ones 

 we found almost inaccessible from their tangle of 

 grapevines and brambles. Lodore, the uppermost 

 and least interesting, is a swift, flumelike rush of 

 forty feet. Tempestia plunges thirty feet straight 

 down its cramped channel on to a bench of harder 

 rock, whence it takes a clear leap of fifty more. 

 The wild and twisted Hurricane, eighty feet high, 

 hurls itself against the chasm wall with a violent 

 current of air. Oceana is made wonderfully beauti- 

 ful by a peculiarity of the geological formation. 

 The local dip of the quartzite being one of almost 

 forty-five degrees to the southeast, in its fourth fall 



C 168 3 



