This page has been validated.
16
THE MONTHLY

pursues it to his doom. All my faculties of terror seemed strained to their extreme, and my mind lost all sensation, except the sole idea of an universal, prodigious, and unbroken motion.

Although the noise exceeded by far the extravagance of my anticipation, I was in some degree prepared for this. I expected too, the loss of breath from the compression of the air, though not the suffocation of the spray; but the wind, the violence of the wind exceeding, as I thought, in swiftness and power the most desolating hurricane. How came the wind there? There, too, in such violence and variety, as if it were the cave of Eolus in rebellion. One would imagine that the river above, fearful of the precipice to which it was rushing, in the folly of its desperation, had seized with giant arms upon the upper air, and in its half-way course abandoned it in agony.

We now came opposite to a part of the sheet, which was thinner, and of course, lighter. The guide stopped and pointed upwards; I looked, and beheld the sun, "shorn of his beams" indeed, and so quenched with the multitudinous waves, that his faint rays shed but a pale and silvery hue upon the cragged and ever humid walls of the cavern.

Nothing can be looked at steadily beneath Niagara. The hand must guard the eyes against the showers which are forced from the main body of the fall, and the head must be constantly averted from a steady position, to escape the sudden and vehement blasts of wind. One is constantly exposed to the sudden rising of the spray, which