on the mill cascades below, and on the mass of the American Fall.
Below, down in the gloom, were patches of foam, slowly circling around in
the eddy--no haste now, just sullen and black satisfaction in the awful
tragedy of the fall. The whole was vague, fearful. Always the roar, the
shuddering of the air. I think that a man placed on this bridge at
night, and ignorant of the cause of the aerial agitation and the wild
uproar, could almost lose his reason in the panic of the scene. They
walked on; they set foot on Her Majesty's dominions; they entered the
Clifton House--quite American, you know, with its new bar and office. A
subdued air about everybody here also, and the same quaking, shivering,
and impending sense of irresponsible force. Even "two fingers," said the
artist, standing at the bar, had little effect in allaying the impression
of the terror out there. When they returned the moon was coming up,
rising and struggling and making its way slowly through ragged masses of
colored clouds. The river could be plainly seen now, smooth, deep,
treacherous; the falls on the American side showed fitfully like patches
of light and foam; the Horseshoe, mostly hidden by a cold silver mist,
occasionally loomed up a white and ghostly mass. They stood for a long
time looking down at the foot of the American Fall, the moon now showing
clearly the plunge of the heavy column--a column as stiff as if it were
melted silver-hushed and frightened by the weird and appalling scene.
They did not know at that moment that there where their eyes were
riveted, there at the base of the fall, a man's body was churning about,
plunged down and cast up, and beaten and whirled, imprisoned in the
refluent eddy. But a body was there. In the morning a man's overcoat
was found on the parapet at the angle of the fall. Someone then
remembered that in the evening, just before the park gate closed, he had
seen a man approach the angle of the wall where the overcoat was found.
The man was never seen after that. Night first, and then the hungry
water, swallowed him. One pictures the fearful leap into the dark, the
midway repentance, perhaps, the despair of the plunge. A body cast in
here is likely to tarry for days, eddying round and round, and tossed in
that terrible maelstrom, before a chance current ejects it, and sends it
down the fierce rapids below. King went back to the hotel in a terror of
the place, which did not leave him so long as he remained. His