The heavy thunder of the falls swept through the forest, increasing as I advanced. The path diverged at one point, and, taking the right hand trail, by means of the roots of the laurel, I descended a cliff’s face in cool, dismal shade. At the bottom, I came out on a black ledge of rock, close to the river. A stupendous fall was before; stern walls of a rocky cañon, 100 feet high, around me, and a blue sky smiling above. I climbed a stair-way of moist rocks, and walked along the path on the cliff’s front to a point directly before the fall’s face. The great volume of the Linville river, formed from drainage for fifteen miles back to the water-shed of the Blue Ridge, here at the gap between Jonas’ Ridge and the Linville mountains, has cut asunder a massive wall, leaving high perpendicular cliffs towering over its surface, and then, with a tremendous leap, pours its current down through space, fifty feet, into the bottom of the cañon. It seems to burst from a dark cavern in the mountain’s center. A pool, sixty feet across, looking like the surface of a lake with dark waves white-capped, spreads in a circle at the base of the cliffs. After recovering from the dizziness of its plunge, the river, leaving the piny walls on either side, rushes along in view for a short distance, and then disappears around the corner of a green promontory. If one, in retracing one’s steps, takes the left hand trail at the point of divergence, and follows it to the edge of the cliffs, a magnificent downward view will be obtained, both of the foot of the cataract, and above, where its waters race in serpentine course, increased in velocity by the plunges over smaller falls only a few yards up the gorge. A wilder solitude, a more picturesque confusion of crags, waters, woods, and mountain heights, can scarcely be found. But even here, man once fitted for himself a dwelling-place; for plainly visible across the tops of the trees, was a little cabin on a small, sloping clearing. No smoke curled upward from its weather-worn roof; its doors had been torn away and chimney leveled. A few cows pastured before it.