Preservation of the Falls 



have of being forced backward, with averted faces, to their fate. 1871 

 Every pulse of the flood is like the grim stride of a giant, wading •^ ames 

 huge-kneed to his purpose, with the white teeth of a victim fast- 

 ened in his neck. The outermost of three small islands, inter- 

 connected by short bridges, at the extremity of this shore, places 

 one in singularly intimate relation with this portentous flurry. To 

 say that hereabouts the water leaps and plunges and rears and 

 dives, that its uproar makes even one's own ideas about it 

 inaudible, and its current sweeps those ideas to perdition, is to give 

 a very pale account of the universal agitation. 



The great spectacle may be called complete only when you 

 have gone down the river some four miles, on the American side, 

 to the so-called rapids of the Whirlpool. Here the unhappy 

 stream tremendously renews its anguish. Two approaches have 

 been contrived on the cliff — one to the rapids proper, the other, 

 farther below, to the scene of the sudden bend. The first consists 

 of a little wooden cage, of the " elevator " pattern, which slides 

 up and down a gigantic perpendicular shaft of horrible flimsiness. 

 But a couple of the usual little brides, staggering beneath the 

 weight of gorgeous cashmeres, entered the conveyance with their 

 respective consorts at the same time with myself; and, as it thus 

 carried Hymen and his fortunes, we survived the adventure. You 

 obtain from below — that is, on the shore of the river — a speci- 

 men of the noblest cliff-scenery. The green embankment at the 

 base of the sheer red wall is by itself a very fair example of what 

 they call in the Rocky Mountains a foot-hill ; and from this con- 

 tinuous pedestal erects itself a bristling palisade of earth. As it 

 stands, Gustave Dore might have drawn it. He would have 

 sketched with especial ardour certain parasitical shrubs and bosk- 

 ages — lone and dizzy witnesses of autumn ; certain outward- 

 peering wens and warts and other perpendicular excrescences of 

 rock; and, above all, near the summit, the fantastic figures of 

 sundry audacious minor cliffs, grafted upon the greater by a mere 

 lateral attachment and based in the empty air, with great slim 



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