Travelers' Original Accounts: 1801-1840 



of the Table Rock, upon which you stood above. You halt — 1807 

 your eye roves wildly over the scene before you — your hair 

 becomes erect, and a sudden chill seems to pervade the whole 

 body, when you reflect that your very existence should, even for 

 a moment, have rested upon the slender shell of what now appears 

 to be a trembling excavated rock, threatening almost instantaneous 

 precipitation into the dreadful abyss below ! 



• • i • • 



I advanced behind the fall, or rather behind the margin of 

 the falling mass, when, on a sudden, I found a difficulty of 

 respiration. The attack was slight, but unexpected. I retreated 

 a step or two, but finally persuaded myself it was nothing more 

 than an involuntary precaution, which my timidity had inspired. 

 I accordingly advanced, but cautiously, to the same spot, where 

 I halted for a moment, and found my respiration easy, which 

 again convinced me that I was mistaken. I therefore moved 

 slowly forward, and had, as near as I can recollect, advanced 

 three or four steps, when I was a second time attacked so severely 

 as nearly to deprive me of my senses. I retreated a few paces, 

 and, lest I should become giddy, and fall into the abyss beneath, 

 set myself down on the wet rock, where, in a few seconds, I 

 discovered I had lost my hat, which I perceived lying about 

 five or six paces from me. One moment's reflection, however, 

 convinced me of the imprudence of a third attempt; I therefore 

 retreated a few steps more in order to make my future experi- 

 ments with less personal danger. 



Finding myself, therefore, in a place of security, I took up a 

 stone weighing one or two pounds and threw it with all my 

 strength between the sheet of falling water and the rocks; it fell 

 about forty feet from where I stood, as if it had there met some- 

 thing to oppose its farther progress. I repeated the experiment 

 above a dozen times, and always found the same result. Larger 

 stones I could cast in any other direction to a distance of eighty 

 and one hundred feet; but immediately behind the falls, about 

 thirty or forty feet, was the greatest distance I could cast one, 



139 



