164 SALMON FISHING IN CANADA. 



thinly clad mountains, suddenly separated by some con- 

 vulsion of nature, so as to form an almost bottomless chasm 

 varying from one to two miles in width ; and then imagine 

 this chasm suddenly half filled with water, and that the 

 moss of centuries has softened the rugged walls on either 

 side, and you will have a pretty accurate idea of the 

 Saguenay. The shores of this river are composed princi- 

 pally of granite, and every bend presents you with an 

 imposing bluff, the majority of which are eight hundred 

 feet high, and many of them upwards of fifteen hundred. 

 Generally speaking, these towering bulwarks are not con- 

 tent to loom perpendicularly into the air, but they must 

 needs bend over, as if to look at their own savage features 

 reflected in the deep. Ay, and that word deep but tells 

 the simple truth ; for the flood that rolls beneath is black 

 and cold as the bottomless pit. To speak without a figure 

 and from actual measurement, I can state that many 

 portions of the Saguenay are one thousand feet deep ; and 

 the shallowest parts not much less than one hundred. In 

 many places too the water is as deep five feet from the 

 rocky barriers as it is in the centre of the stream. The 

 feelings which filled my breast, and the thoughts which 

 oppressed my brain, as I paddled by these places in my 

 canoe, were allied to those which almost overwhelmed me, 

 when I first looked upward from below the fall to the 

 mighty flood of Niagara. Awful beyond expression is the 

 sensation which one experiences in sailing along the 



