American side, for it is much better seen from the other, though seen
from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole prodigious
spectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seas of the North,
Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and the multitude of smaller lakes, all
pour their floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistless
under-currents boiling beneath the surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly
from this scene of secret power, so different from the thunderous
splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a
height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge almost to their
create with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the
lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling
rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river.
Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do not know the
half of its terribleness; for those waters that look so smooth are great
ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents, twelve feet
higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and with
what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and
tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad, maniacal patience. The
guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly rob
of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the
whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life,
apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid
the waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the death that has
long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspension bridge, is an
elevator more than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to let
people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids on their
own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure
of pine sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks; and at any rate,
as it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced perfectly
safe.

In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and
his ladies again, who got into the movable chamber with them, and they
all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind,
either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the
lugubrious upper part of the structure