their heads and declined to budge a step further. Even they had their superstitions.
"Ba'al, me go. Black no like this place. Debil-debil sit down alongside Baròlin," sulkily replied Pompo; and Sam Shehan pointed to a smooth, treacherous bed of sand, where the river course widened and wound round the precipice, and explained with a greater fulness of detail than might have been expected from his usually taciturn demeanour, that no doubt the tales of Baròlin Rock and the second Waterfall—the existence of which he flatly denied, having, he said, gone as far round the precipice as it was possible for human being to venture—and the legend of the petrified chief waking to lure his victims to destruction had arisen from the fact of the quicksand which made it impossible for man or beast to cross the river bed.
"Well, at any rate," said Lady Waveryng, who was more tired than she had expected, and not altogether inclined for further exploration, "this is well worth having gone through so much to see."
The waterfall, fed it was said by a subterranean channel from the lake on the top of Mount Luya was of no enormous height or volume, but could hardly be equalled in picturesqueness, as it stole from the black masses of the scrub, with the grand girdling precipice just above—a sharp wavy line against the sky—its colour a greenish white, the band broken into a foamy zig-zag midway in its course, and thundering in a cloud of spray into a round pool of deepest in tensest blue churned into froth where the waters met. The jagged pines gave a certain weirdness to the scene, and the utter absence of any sign of humanity added to its extreme wildness and desolation. A few giant gums hung with moss grew a little back from the river bed. Here and there was a funereal cedar, and the ti-trees on the lower banks were twisted and bent with the force of floods, which had left their mark on the precipice and had swept into the watercourse huge boulders of stone, great tree-trunks, and wrack of every kind. In places the river bed glistened with crystals as bright almost as diamonds. Close on each side
