Page:Scenes in my Native Land.pdf/18

14 These falls are more beautiful, though not so terrific as the great one. Still they appear much higher, as they do not, like that, pour over in a vast arch, but are precipitated so perpendicularly as to appear an entire sheet of foam from the top to the bottom. Seen from the Table-Rock, the tumbling green waters of the rapids, which persuade you that an ocean is approaching, the brilliant color of the water, the frightful gulf, and headlong torrent at your feet, the white column rising from its centre, and often reaching to the clouds, the black wall of rock frowning from the opposite island, and the long curtain of foam descending from the other shore, interrupted only by one dark shaft, form altogether one of the most beautiful, as well as awful scenes in nature. The effect of all these objects is much heightened by being seen from a dizzy and fearful pinnacle, upon which you seem suspended over a fathomless abyss of vapor, whence ascends the deafening uproar of the greatest cataract in the world, and by reflecting that this powerful torrent has been rushing down, and this grand scene of stormy magnificence been in the same dreadful tumult for ages, and will continue so for ages to come."

The view from the foot of the Table-Rock is, if possible, still more impressive. Standing on a level with the margin of the river, and gazing upward, you obtain a more overwhelmningoverwhelming [sic] idea of the majesty of the flood, which seems to be falling from the heavens.