THE PRECIPICE. 71 



mountains was riven, and the encircling peaks bowing 

 in terror, reeled like ships upon a tossing ocean, and 

 the roar of a thousand storms rolled away from the 

 yawning gulf, into which precipices and forests went 

 down with the deafening crash of a falling world. A 

 huge mass that then had been loosened from its high 

 bed, and hurled below, making a cliff of itself, from 

 which to fall would have been certain death, our 

 guide called the "Church," — and it did lift itself there 

 like a huge altar, right in front of the main precipice 

 that rose in a naked wall more than a thousand feet* 

 perpendicular. It is two thousand feet from the sum- 

 mit to the base, but part of the chasm has been filled 

 with its own ruins, so that the spot on which you 

 stand is a thousand feet above the valley below, and 

 nearly three thousand above tide water. Thus it 

 stretches for three-quarters of a mile — in no place less 

 than five hundred feet perpendicular. By dint of 

 scrambling and pulling each other up, we at last suc- 

 ceeded in reaching the top of the church, while from 

 our very feet rose this awful cliff that really oppressed 

 me with its near and frightful presence. Majestic, 

 solemn and silent, with the daylight from above pour- 

 * Some say a thousand, others twelve hundred. 



