There is a great plenty of water stored away in these mountains, and it has been pouring through this rent in the bosom of the earth, wearing away a few feet here and a few feet there, augmenting in volume as the space for it increased, until it has become a wild, resistless torrent, which doesn't dance, but rushes through the rocks, till after its brief attack of delirium tremens it loses itself in the Rhone and finally in Lake Geneva, and becomes as quiet and well-behaved as you could wish. The scenic artist who painted "The Devil's Glen" in the Black Crook, had doubtless visited this gorge. If devils ever came together in convention, and wanted a place, the horrible wildness of which should be absolutely satanic, they could find it here. The rocks on either hand are nearly five hundred feet high, and the ravine twists and turns in every direction, the sides approaching each other so nearly at every turn at their summit that the gorge seems to be but an immense vaulted cavern with an entirely irresponsible torrent of water gyrating through it. It drops itself down sheer precipices, in places thirty feet, and everywhere _rushes_, it never dances, but rushes with an ugly, wicked, vindictive rush, a cruel rush, a resistless force, as if it wanted to catch something in its merciless grasp, and toss it against rocks, grasp it when it came back, and hurl it down a dizzy fall of cruel, jagged rocks, and shoot it way up the side of the gorge, on other rocks, and finally release it when pounded to a jelly, in the river below. This water is well-behaved enough when it reaches the river, but up here in the gorge it is the wildest, most cruel, most devilish and wicked water I ever saw. Niagara impresses one with its calm, resistless strength, Minnehaha is beautiful enough to induce one, almost, to go over it, but this torrent in the gorge has strength only. It is a fiendish, impish body of water. [Sidenote: THE LEGEND OF THE GORGE.] It is not utilized. Its only use is to support a very good hotel, the venerable party who takes a franc for admission to it, and several shops devoted to selling "souvenirs" to tourists. These are the only wheels this water power turns. About one hundred people make a comfortable living from the gorge, and they no doubt esteem it highly. Of course the gorge has its legend. Every well regulated gorge in Switzerland as well as every other country in Europe has a legend, done in the most atrocious English, and execrably printed, which you can purchase of the local guide for what is equivalent to ten cents American money. I doubt not that Switzerland has a legend-factory running somewhere, which turns them out to order. People go several times, you see, and they want a new legend every time. This legend accounts for the formation of the gorge, and I spent an entire night getting it into understandable English. It runs thus:--