Travelers' Original Accounts Since 1840 



to use the mildest term. Mr. Blackwell, however, persevered, and 1859 

 had some 200 Bengal lights made of the very largest size which ° 8 

 it was possible to manufacture. About 50 or 60 of these were 

 placed in a row under the cliffs, beneath Clifton House, and 

 facing the American Fall; 50 or 60 more were placed under 

 Table Rock, and 50 or 60 behind the sheet of water itself, the 

 entrance to which, from the Canadian side I have already 

 described to the reader. At ten o'clock at night they were all 

 lit, and their effect was something grand, magical, brilliant, and 

 wonderful beyond all power of words to pourtray. In an instant 

 the whole mass of water, glowing vivid, and as if incandescent 

 in the intense light, seemed turned to molten silver. From behind 

 the Fall the light shown with such dazzling brilliancy that the 

 waters immediately before it looked like a sheet of crystal glass, 

 a cascade of diamonds, every bead and stream in which leapt 

 and sparkled and spread the glare over the whole scene, like a 

 river of lighted phosphorus. The boiling rapids underneath 

 dimly reflected back the pale livid gleam as from a mirror, 

 lighting up the trees and rocks and all the wild torn chasm 

 through which the rapids pour, and showing out the old grey 

 ruins of Table Rock like the remains of a huge dilapidated tower. 

 The smoke, too, rose in thick dense masses, spreading upwards 

 over the cataracts in a luminous cloud that seemed as if Niagara 

 was in a blaze from base to summit. But all this grandeur and 

 beauty were as nothing to the effect produced when the lights 

 were changed from white to red. Niagara seemed turned to 

 blood in colour, but so bright, so lurid in its deep effulgence that 

 a river of seething, roaring, hellish fire appeared to have taken 

 the place in an instant of the cold, stern, eternal Falls. None 

 could look upon this scene, the huge, fiery, blood-red mass, dark- 

 looking and clotted in the centre, without a feeling of awe. You 

 could not speak, so sublime were its terrors, nor move your gaze 

 from the blazing caldron underneath the Falls, where the river 

 seemed in its frothy red foam like boiling blood. 



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