after
scrambling up beside the first waterfall I was forced to take off
shoes and stockings and work my way up the irregular bed, now wading
knee-deep, now clambering or leaping from boulder to boulder; and,
even so, to press from time to time through the meeting boughs,
shielding my face from scratches. So, for at least a mile, I climbed
as through a narrow green tunnel, and at the end of it found myself
wet to the skin. Five waterfalls I had passed, and, beside the
fourth, where the bank was muddy, had noted a long, smooth mark, and
recent, such as a man's foot might make in slipping; so that I felt
pretty confident of being on my companions' track, though I wondered
how the Captain, with his lame leg, could sustain such a climb.

But above the fifth waterfall the stream divided into two branches,
and at the fork of them I stood for a while in doubt which to choose.
So far as volume of water went, there was, indeed, little or nothing
to choose. If direction counted, the main stream would be that which
came rushing down the gorge straight ahead of me--a gorge which,
however, as my eye followed the V of its tree-tops up to the
sky-line, promised to grow steeper and worse tangled. On the other
hand, the tributary (as I shall call it), which poured down from a
lateral valley on my left, ran with an easier flow, as though drawing
its waters from less savage slopes. I could not see these slopes--a
bend of the hills hid them; but I reasoned that if a clump of trees,
separate and distinguishable, stood anywhere near the banks of
either stream, it might possibly be found by this one. The other
showed nothing but a close mass of vegetation.

Accordingly I turned my steps up the channel to the left, and was
rewarded, after another twenty minutes' scramble, by emerging
upon a break in the forest. On one side of the stream rose a
reddish-coloured cliff, almost smooth of face and about seventy or
eighty feet high, across the edge of which the last trees on the
summit clutched with their naked roots, as though protesting
against being thrust over the precipice by the crowd behind them.
The other bank swelled up, from a little above the water's edge, to a
fair green lawn, rounded, grassy, and smooth as a glade in an English
park. At its widest I dare say that, from the stream's edge back to
the steep slope where the forest started again and climbed to a tall
ridge that shut in the glen on the south side, it measured someth