FAR AND NEAR 



deed, ihey are a sort of double Nia<i;ara, one of rocks 

 and one of water, and liie beholder hardly knows 

 wliich is the more impressive. The river above the 

 main fall is split up into several strands by isolated 

 masses of towering rocks ; each of these strands 

 ends in a beautiful fall, forty or fifty feet in hei<.dit; 

 then the several currents unite for the final plunge 

 down a precipice of two hundred and fifty feet. 

 To get a different, and if possible a closer view of 

 the falls, we climbed down the side of the chasm, 

 by means of ladders and footsteps cut in the rock 

 and soil, to the margin of the river below. Here we 

 did homage at the foot of the grand spectacle and 

 gazed upward into its awful face. The canyon 

 below the falls is so broad that the river has an easy 

 egress, hence there is nothing of that terrible agony 

 upon the face of the waters that we see in the gorge 

 below Niagara. Niagara is much the more impos- 

 ing spectacle. Shoshone is the more ideal and 

 poetic. It is a fall from an abyss into a deeper abyss. 

 A few miles below the falls are still other wonders 

 in the shape of underground rivers which leap out 

 of huge openings in the side of the canyon, — a 

 subterranean water system cut across by a larger 

 river. The streams that emerge in this dramatic 

 manner arc doubtless the same that suddenly take 

 to earth far to the northward. Why they also did 

 not cut canyons in the plain is an interesting prob- 

 lem. 



14 



