Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/419

 stroke of some giant's axe. With an intolerable roar, the whole body of the river leaped in a sheet of foam into the black abyss seventy feet below, throwing great jets of spray aloft that hung like a mist in the still air, drenching rocks and trees for many yards around till they dripped with moisture, and churning up the waters of the pool into which it. fell, so that their surface was a boiling, heaving mass that looked as white and almost as solid as cotton wool. A little lower downstream the pools widened out somewhat, and here the waters were so deep a green that they were nearly black, circling slowly round and round in innumerable, sullen- looking eddies, ere they shot forward again upon their course to plunge down fall after fall in never-ending strife. Even under the brilliant afternoon sunlight the place was steeped in a profound, mysterious gloom.

From where I was perched I could see for near a quarter of a mile along the river's length-a most unusually extended view in the heart of a Malayan jungle and at every yard of the way Death was written in unmistakable characters for any living thing that the falls might succeed in sucking into their grip. Had we taken the channel on the right, instead of that which we had chanced to select, nothing could have saved us; had our raft not come to wreck exactly where it did, a moment later malchwood would have been nade of it and of us; for once within the clutch of the upper fall, nothing could have saved us from a dreadful death. As l