From the Indian village to the cataract was some three or four leagues: it took my guide and me as many hours to reach it. Already at six miles' distance, a column of vapour indicated the situation of the weir to my eyes. My heart beat with joy mingled with terror, as I entered the wood that concealed from my view one of the grandest spectacles which nature has offered to mankind. We dismounted. Leading our horses by the bridle, we passed through heaths and thickets until we came to the bank of the Niagara River, seven or eight hundred paces above the falls. As I never ceased going forward, the guide caught me by the arm; he stopped me on the very edge of the water, which passed with the swiftness of an arrow. It did not seethe, but glided in one sole mass to the slope of the rock; its silence before its fall contrasted with the uproar of the fall itself. The Scriptures often compare a people to the mighty waters: here it was a dying people which, deprived of its voice by the agony of death, went to hurl itself into the abyss of eternity. The guide continued to hold me back, for I felt, so to speak, drawn on by the stream, and I had an involuntary longing to fling myself in. At one time, I would turn my eyes up the river, to the banks; at another, down to the island which divided the waters. Here the waters suddenly failed, as though cut off in the sky. After a quarter of an hour of vague and perplexed admiration, I went on to the falls. The reader will find in the _Essai sur les révolutions_[487] and in _Atala_[488] the two descriptions which I have written of the scene. Today, high-roads run to the cataract; there are inns on the American side and on the English side, and mills and factories overhang the chasm.