Loch Avon lying in a small
pool at the base of the dizzy height, the stream leaps at once from the
edge of the hill, and disappears for a time, reappearing again far down
in a narrow thread, as white as the snow from which it has issued. Down
the wide channel, which the stream occupies in its moments of fulness
and pride--moments when it is all too terrible to be approached by
mortal footsteps--the traveller must find his way; and, if he understand
his business, he may, by judiciously adapting to his purpose the many
ledges and fractures caused by the furious bursts of the flooded stream,
and by a judicious system of zig-zagging, convert the channel, so far as
he is himself concerned, into a sort of rough staircase, some two
thousand feet or so in length. The torrent itself takes a more direct
course; and he who has descended by the ravine may well look up with
wonder at what has the appearance of a continuous cataract, which,
falling a large mass of waters at his feet, seems as if it diminished
and disappeared in the heavens. The Staubbach, or Fall of Dust, in
Lauter Brunen, is beyond question a fine object. The water is thrown
sheer off the edge of a perpendicular rock, and reaches the ground in a
massive shower nine hundred feet high. But with all respect for this
wonder of the world, we are scarcely disposed to admit that it is a
grander fall than this rumbling, irregular, unmeasured cataract which
tumbles through the cleft between Ben Muich Dhui and Ben Avon. We should
not omit, by the way, for the benefit of those who are better acquainted
with Scottish than with Continental scenery, to notice the resemblance
of this torrent to the Gray Mare's Tail in Moffat-dale. In the character
both of the stream itself and in the immediate scenery there are many
points of resemblance, every thing connected with the Avon being of
course on the larger scale.

Our wanderer has perhaps indulged himself in the belief that he has been
traversing these solitudes quite alone--how will he feel if he shall
discover that he has been accompanied in every step and motion by a
shadowy figure of huge proportions and savage mien, flourishing in his
band a great pine-tree, in ghastly parallel with all the motions of the
traveller's staff? Such are the spirits of the air haunting this howling
wilderness, where the pale sheeted phantom of the burial vault or the
deserted cloister would lose all his terrors and feel himself utterly
insignificant.