rest and compose its gray,
agitated waters before taking the grand plunge, then slowly slipping
over the lip of the pool basin, it descends another glossy slope with
rapidly accelerated speed to the brink of the tremendous cliff, and with
sublime, fateful confidence springs out free in the air.

I took off my shoes and stockings and worked my way cautiously down
alongside the rushing flood, keeping my feet and hands pressed firmly on
the polished rock. The booming, roaring water, rushing past close to my
head, was very exciting. I had expected that the sloping apron would
terminate with the perpendicular wall of the valley, and that from the
foot of it, where it is less steeply inclined, I should be able to lean
far enough out to see the forms and behavior of the fall all the way
down to the bottom. But I found that there was yet another small brow
over which I could not see, and which appeared to be too steep for
mortal feet. Scanning it keenly, I discovered a narrow shelf about three
inches wide on the very brink, just wide enough for a rest for one's
heels. But there seemed to be no way of reaching it over so steep a
brow. At length, after careful scrutiny of the surface, I found an
irregular edge of a flake of the rock some distance back from the margin
of the torrent. If I was to get down to the brink at all that rough
edge, which might offer slight finger-holds, was the only way. But the
slope beside it looked dangerously smooth and steep, and the swift
roaring flood beneath, overhead, and beside me was very nerve-trying. I
therefore concluded not to venture farther, but did nevertheless. Tufts
of artemisia were growing in clefts of the rock near by, and I filled my
mouth with the bitter leaves, hoping they might help to prevent
giddiness. Then, with a caution not known in ordinary circumstances, I
crept down safely to the little ledge, got my heels well planted on it,
then shuffled in a horizontal direction twenty or thirty feet until
close to the outplunging current, which, by the time it had descended
thus far, was already white. Here I obtained a perfectly free view down
into the heart of the snowy, chanting throng of comet-like streamers,
into which the body of the fall soon separates.

While perched on that narrow niche I was not distinctly conscious of
danger. The tremendous grandeur of the fall in form and sound and
motion, acting at close range, smothered the sense of fear, and in such
places one's body