The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
- Page 145 of 466 - First - Home
I Do Not Care For Any Waterfall But Niagara, Nor Do I Care In Itself
For This One, For Though
Its first leap is 200 feet and its second
1,600, it is so frittered away and dissipated in spray,
Owing to the
very magnitude of its descent, that there is no volume of water
within sight to create mass or sound. But no words can paint the
majesty of the surroundings, the caverned, precipitous walls of rock
coming down in one black plunge from the blue sky above to the dark
abyss of water below, the sullen shuddering sound with which pieces
of rock came hurtling down among the trees, the thin tinkle of the
water as it falls, the full rush of the river, the feathery growth
of ferns, gigantic below, but so diminished by the height above, as
only to show their presence by the green tinge upon the rocks, while
in addition to the gloom produced by the stupendous height of the
cliffs, there is a cool, green darkness of dense forest, and mighty
trees of strange tropical forms glass themselves in the black mirror
of the basin. For one moment a ray of sunshine turned the upper
part of the spray into a rainbow, and never to my eyes had the bow
of promise looked so heavenly as when it spanned the black, solemn,
tree-shadowed abyss, whose deep, still waters only catch a sunbeam
on five days of the year.
I found the natives regaling themselves on papaya, and on live
fresh-water shrimps, which they find in great numbers in the river.
I remembered that white people at home calling themselves civilized,
eat live, or at least raw, oysters, but the sight of these active,
squirming shrimps struggling between the white teeth of my
associates was yet more repulsive.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 145 of 466
Words from 39874 to 40179
of 127766
