Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
trembling structure across the chasm! They advanced upon it. There were
gleams on the mill cascades below, and on the mass of the American Fall.
Below, down in the gloom, were patches of foam, slowly circling around
in the eddy--no haste now, just sullen and black satisfaction in the
awful tragedy of the fall. The whole was vague, fearful. Always the
roar, the shuddering of the air. I think that a man placed on this
bridge at night, and ignorant of the cause of the aerial agitation and
the wild uproar, could almost lose his reason in the panic of the scene.
They walked on; they set foot on Her Majesty's dominions; they entered
the Clifton House--quite American, you know, with its new bar and
office. A subdued air about everybody here also, and the same quaking,
shivering, and impending sense of irresponsible force. Even “two
fingers,” said the artist, standing at the bar, had little effect in
allaying the impression of the terror out there. When they returned
the moon was coming up, rising and struggling and making its way slowly
through ragged masses of colored clouds. The river could be plainly seen
now, smooth, deep, treacherous; the falls on the American side showed
fitfully like patches of light and foam; the Horseshoe, mostly hidden
by a cold silver mist, occasionally loomed up a white and ghostly mass.
They stood for a long time looking down at the foot of the American
Fall, the moon now showing clearly the plunge of the heavy column--a
column as stiff as if it were melted silver-hushed and frightened by the
weird and appalling scene. They did not know at that moment that there
where their eyes were riveted, there at the base of the fall, a man's
body was churning about, plunged down and cast up, and beaten and
whirled, imprisoned in the refluent eddy. But a body was there. In the
morning a man's overcoat was found on the parapet at the angle of the
fall. Someone then remembered that in the evening, just before the park
gate closed, he had seen a man approach the angle of the wall where the
overcoat was found. The man was never seen after that. Night first, and
then the hungry water, swallowed him. One pictures the fearful leap into
the dark, the midway repentance, perhaps, the despair of the plunge. A
body cast in here is likely to tarry for days, eddying round and round,
and tossed in that terrible maelstrom, before a chance current ejects
it, and sends it down the fierce rapids below. King went back to the
hotel in a terror of the place, which did not leave him so long as he
remained. His room quivered, the roar filled all the air. Is not life
real and terrible enough, he asked himself, but that brides must cast
this experience also into their honeymoon?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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