Page:Portraits of Places (London, Macmillan and Co., 1883).djvu/388

 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 specimen 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 continuous pedestal erects itself a bristling palisade of earth. As it stands, Gustave Doré might have drawn it. He would have sketched with especial ardour certain parasitical shrubs and boskages—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 trees rooted on their verges, like the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The actual whirlpool is a third of a mile farther down the river, and is best seen from the cliff above. From this point of view, it seems to me by all odds the finest of the secondary episodes of the drama of Niagara, and one on which a scribbling tourist,