we became insensible to danger and gave ourselves up to the full
enjoyment of it.

Very beautiful as is this fall, it is greatly excelled in grandeur and
magnificence by the cataract half a mile below it, where the river takes
another perpendicular plunge of three hundred and twenty feet into the
most gloomy cavern that ever received so majestic a visitant. Between
the two falls, the river, though bordered by lofty precipices, expands
in width and flows gently over a nearly level surface until its near
approach to the verge. Here a sudden convergence in the rocks compresses
its channel, and with a gurgling, choking struggle, it leaps with a
single bound, sheer from an even level shelf, into the tremendous
chasm. The sheet could not be more perfect if wrought by art. The
Almighty has vouchsafed no grander scene to human eyes. Every object
that meets the vision increases its sublimity. There is a majestic
harmony in the whole, which I have never seen before in nature's
grandest works. The fall itself takes its leap between the jaws of rocks
whose vertical height above it is more than six hundred feet, and more
than nine hundred feet above the chasm into which it falls. Long before
it reaches the base it is enveloped in spray, which is woven by the
sun's rays into bows radiant with all the colors of the prism, and
arching the face of the cataract with their glories. Five hundred feet
below the edge of the cañon, and one hundred and sixty feet above the
verge of the cataract, and overlooking the deep gorge beneath, on the
flattened summit of a projecting crag, I lay with my face turned into
the boiling chasm, and with a stone suspended by a large cord measured
its profoundest depths. Three times in its descent the cord was parted
by abrasion, but at last, securing the weight with a leather band, I was
enabled to ascertain by a measurement which I think quite exact, the
height of the fall. It is a little more than three hundred and twenty