“The only direful alternative was now in full possession of us, (I am not going to tell the ‘_story_’ _yet_), for just below us was a stately bluff of 200 feet in height, rising out of the water, at an angle of forty-five degrees, entirely denuded in front, and constituted of clay. ‘Montons, montons!’ said Ba’tiste, as he hastily clambered up its steep inclined plane on his hands and feet, over its parched surface, which had been dried in the sun, ‘essayez vous, essayez! ce’n’est pas difficile Monsr. Cataline,’ exclaimed he, from an elevation of about 100 feet from the water, where he had found a level platform, of some ten or fifteen feet in diameter, and stood at its brink, waving his hand over the twilight landscape that lay in partial obscurity beneath him. “‘Nous avons ici une belle place pour for to get some _slips_, some _coot slips_, vare de dam Riccaree et de dam muskeet shall nevare get si haut, by Gar! montez, montez en haut.’ “Bogard and I took our buffalo robes and our rifles, and with difficulty hung and clung along in the crevices with fingers and toes, until we reached the spot. We found ourselves about half-way up the precipice, which continued almost perpendicular above us; and within a few yards of us, on each side, it was one unbroken slope from the bottom to the top. In this snug little nook were we most appropriately fixed, as we thought, for a warm summer’s night, out of the reach entirely of musquitoes, and all other earthly obstacles, as we supposed, to the approaching gratification, for which the toils and fatigues of the preceding day and night, had so admirably prepared us. We spread one of our robes, and having ranged ourselves side by side upon it, and drawn the other one over us, we commenced, without further delay, upon the pleasurable forgetfulness of toils and dangers which had agitated us for the past day and night. We had got just about to that stage of our enjoyment which is almost resistless, and nearly bidding defiance to every worldly obstrusive obstacle, when the pattering of rain on our buffalo robes opened our eyes to the dismal scene that was getting up about us! _My_ head was out, and on the watch; but the other two skulls were flat upon the ground, and there chained by the unyielding links of iron slumber. The blackest of all clouds that ever swept hill tops of grass, of clay, or towering rock, was hanging about us—its lightning’s glare was incessantly flashing us to blindness; and the giddy elevation on which we were perched, seemed to tremble with the roar and jar of distant, and the instant bolts and cracks of present thunder! The rain poured and fell in torrents (its not enough); it seemed _floating_ around and above us in waves succeeding waves, which burst upon the sides of the immense avalanche of clay that was above, and _slid_ in _sheets_, upon us! Heavens! what a scene was here. The river beneath us and in distance, with windings