minutes, I have really forgotten which. But it was very extraordinary,
anyhow. It is worth the price of admission to hear the guide tell the
story nine times in succession to different parties, and never miss a
word or alter a sentence or a gesture.
Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between
the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and
the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you.
Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together,
they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.
On the Canada side you drive along the chasm between long ranks of
photographers standing guard behind their cameras, ready to make an
ostentatious frontispiece of you and your decaying ambulance, and your
solemn crate with a hide on it, which you are expected to regard in the
light of a horse, and a diminished and unimportant background of sublime
Niagara; and a great many people have the incredible effrontery or the
native depravity to aid and abet this sort of crime.
Any day, in the hands of these photographers, you may see stately
pictures of papa and mamma, Johnny and Bub and Sis or a couple of country
cousins, all smiling vacantly, and all disposed in studied and
uncomfortable attitudes in their carriage, and all looming up in their
awe-inspiring imbecility before the snubbed and diminished presentment of
that majestic presence whose ministering spirits are the rainbows, whose
voice is the thunder, whose awful front is veiled in clouds, who was
monarch here dead and forgotten ages before this hackful of small
reptiles was deemed temporarily necessary to fill a crack in the world’s
unnoted myriads, and will still be monarch here ages and decades of ages
after they shall have gathered themselves to their blood-relations, the
other worms, and been mingled with the unremembering dust.
There is no actual harm in making Niagara a background whereon to display
one’s marvelous insignificance in a good strong light, but it requires a
sort of superhuman self-complacency to enable one to do it.
When you have examined the stupendous Horseshoe Fall till you are
satisfied you cannot improve on it, you return to America by the new
Suspension Bridge, and follow up the bank to where they exhibit the Cave
of the Winds.
Here I followed instructions, and divested myself of all my clothing, and
put on a waterproof jacket and overalls. This costume is picturesque,
but not beautiful. A guide, similarly dressed, led the way down a flight
of winding stairs, which wound and wound, and still kept on winding long
after the thing ceased to be a novelty, and then terminated long before
it had begun to be a pleasure. We were then well down under the
precipice, but still considerably above the level of the river.
We now began to creep along flimsy bridges of a single plank, our persons
shielded from destruction by a crazy wooden railing, to which I clung
with both hands–not because I was afraid, but because I wanted to.
Presently the descent became steeper and the bridge flimsier, and sprays
from the American Fall began to rain down on us in fast increasing sheets
that soon became blinding, and after that our progress was mostly in the
nature of groping. Nova a furious wind began to rush out from behind the
waterfall, which seemed determined to sweep us from the bridge, and
scatter us on the rocks and among the torrents below. I remarked that I
wanted to go home; but it was too late. We were almost under the
monstrous wall of water thundering down from above, and speech was in
vain in the midst of such a pitiless crash of sound.
In another moment the guide disappeared behind the deluge, and bewildered
by the thunder, driven helplessly by the wind, and smitten by the arrowy
tempest of rain, I followed. All was darkness. Such a mad storming,
roaring, and bellowing of warring wind and water never crazed my ears
before. I bent my head, and seemed to receive the Atlantic on my back.
The world seemed going to destruction. I could not see anything, the