From a distance the American fall looks quite straight. When we stand beside it we see that its line curves inward and outward, throwing the falling sheet into bastion-like sweeps. As we gaze down upon these, every change in the angle of vision and in the strength and direction of the light gives a new effect. The one thing that we never seem to see, below the smooth brink, is water. Very often the whole swift precipice shows as a myriad million inch-thick cubes of clearest glass or ice or solidified light, falling in an envelope of starry spangles. Again, it seems all diamond-like or pearl-like, or like a flood of flaked silver, shivered crystal, or faceted ingots of palest amber. It is never to be exhausted in its variations. It is never to be described. Only, one can always say, it is protean, it is most lovely, and it is not water. Then, as we look across the precipice, it may be milky in places, or transparent, or translucent. But where its mass falls quickly it is all soft and white--softer then anything else in the world. It does not resemble a flood of fleece or of down, although it suggests such a flood. It is more like a crumbling avalanche, immense and gently blown, of smallest snowflakes; but, again, it is not quite like this. Now we see that, even apart from its main curves, no portion of the swiftly moving wall is flat. It is all delicately fissured and furrowed, by the broken edges of the rock over which it falls, into the suggestion of fluted buttresses, half-columns, pilasters. And the whiteness of these is not quite white. Nor is it consistently iridescent or opalescent. Very faintly, elusively, it is tinged with tremulous stripes and strands of pearly grey, of vaguest straw, shell-pink, lavender, and green--inconceivably ethereal blues, shy ghosts of earthly colours, abashed and deflowered, we feel, by definite naming with earthly names. They seem hardly to tinge the whiteness; rather, to float over it as a misty bloom. We are loath to turn our eyes from them, fearing they may never show again. Yet they are as real as the keen emerald of the Horseshoe.[10] One should walk through the New York State Reservation, which extends for some distance above the commencement of the Rapids, to get a more complete view of the scenery above the Falls, the wooded shores of Goat Island, the swiftly moving waters, the broad river, the beginning of the Canadian Rapids, and the Canadian shore in the distance. On up the river at a distance are to be seen those forest-clad shores of Navy Island and Grand Island.