rapids for about four hundred feet; but
the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen
hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be
imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst
of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from
the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the
grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.

While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-no," or "The
Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the
second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good,
so is Po-ho-no an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is
scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been
carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water
forever rushing down a _canon_ through which the stream breaks from its
feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers
his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-no; while the
very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of
the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap
of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet
perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the
Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty
feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in
fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy
sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free
of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth
at her granite wedding,--no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle
like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her
nuptials.

On either side of Po-ho-no the sky-line of the precipice is
magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown
of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly
bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is
Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three
hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers,"
flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior
bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of
thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.

One of the loveliest