loitered by the rapid waters, flinging light branches and flowers upon the blood-coloured torrent, that whirled, and dragged, and tossed them down to the plunge beneath. When we came to the beautiful circular fall, we crept down to a narrow ridge, and sat with our feet hanging over the black caldron, just opposite a vivid rainbow that was clasping the waterfall. We sat here till I began to grow dizzy with the sound and motion of the churning darkness beneath us, and begged to move, which we did very cautiously. I was in an agony lest we should slip from the narrow dripping ledges along which we crawled. We wandered on, and stopped again at another fall, upon a rocky shelf overhanging the torrent, beside the blasted and prostrate trunk of a large tree. I was tired with walking, and ---- was lifting me up to seat me on the fallen tree, when we saw Mr. ---- coming slowly towards us. He stopped and spoke to us, and presently passed on; we remained behind, talking, and dipping our hands into the fresh water. At length we rejoined the whole party, sitting by a narrow channel, where the water looked like ink. Beyond this our guide said it was impossible to go: I was for ascertaining this by myself, but my father forbade me to attempt the passage further. I was thirsty; and the guide having given me a beautiful strawberry and a pale blue-bell, that he had found, like a couple of jewels in some dark crevice of the rocks, I devoured the one, and then going down to the black water's edge, we dipped the fairy cup in, and drank the cold clear water, with which abundant draught I relieved my father's thirst also.[103] Around the place where we were resting, the rocks rose like circular walls up to the very sky. From their overhanging edges, tiny threads of water fell upon the rocky pavement beneath, with a silver glancing, and a clear plashing tone, that sounded even amid the hoarse talking of the dark waters below. In some mould among these cliffs, at their very highest edge, a tree had struck its roots, and, growing upside down, stretched its drooping green arms to the hurrying stream below, that would not tarry. We had walked, I suppose, a mile and a half along the water's side, and in this distance its course is broken by six beautiful cataracts. The variety of the colour of the water, occasioned by the various depths of its channel, and the different tints of the rocks over which it flows, is singular. Where the river expands, its rapid broken waves were of the darkest red-brown, like coffee; or rather, indeed, redder than that, like a deep blood colour: reaching the walls of rock, over which they fall into a lower bed, they became pouring masses of amber and diamonds, or soft thick heaps of whitest foam; and then again, in the deep narrow channels which received their headlong leaping, all was black as blackest night, and the waters were sucked away under the hollow rocks in inky eddies, that made me think of drowning with double horror. The