Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
Surely it is an island of magic, unsubstantial, liable to go adrift and
plunge into the canon. Even in the forest path, where the great tree
trunks assure one of stability and long immunity, this feeling cannot be
shaken off. Our party descended the winding staircase in the tower, and
walked on the shelf under the mighty ledge to the entrance of the Cave
of the Winds. The curtain of water covering this entrance was blown back
and forth by the wind, now leaving the platform dry and now deluging it.
A woman in the pathway was beckoning frantically and calling to a man
who stood on the platform, entirely unconscious of danger, looking up
to the green curtain and down into the boiling mist. It was Mrs. Stubbs;
but she was shouting against Niagara, and her husband mistook her
pantomime for gestures of wonder and admiration. Some moments
passed, and then the curtain swung in, and tons of water drenched the
Englishman, and for an instant hid him from sight. Then, as the curtain
swung back, he was seen clinging to the handrail, sputtering and
astonished at such treatment. He came up the bank dripping, and
declaring that it was extraordinary, most extraordinary, but he wouldn't
have missed it for the world. From this platform one looks down the
narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the boiling mist, and wonders
at the daring that built these steps down into that hell, and carried
the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside the fall. A party in
oil-skins, making their way there, looked like lost men and women in
a Dante Inferno. The turbulent waters dashed all about them; the mist
occasionally wrapped them from sight; they clung to the rails, they
tried to speak to each other; their gestures seemed motions of despair.
Could that be Eurydice whom the rough guide was tenderly dragging out of
the hell of waters, up the stony path, that singular figure in oil-skin
trousers, who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood as she emerged?
One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a woman; but
why take her there? The group of adventurers stopped a moment on the
platform, with the opening into the misty cavern for a background, and
the artist said that the picture was, beyond all power of the pencil,
strange and fantastic. There is nothing, after all, that the human race
will not dare for a new sensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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