Leda Falls.
These Falls are situated on the Saxleby tin claim, seven miles from George’s Bay, and in the centre of the tin mining district. A stream which takes its rise in the high granite hills of the district after flowing through button-grass marshes, and dense thickets of banera, cutting-grass and ti-tree, suddenly plunges down a deep romantic rocky gorge. Here it is broken into numerous miniature falls—now eddying round the walls of a granite basin which it has carved out through untold ages, and anon babbling among the moss-covered stones which interrupt its course, till when halfway through the gorge it leaps over a deep vertical precipice with deafening roar. At the verge of this precipice the stream is intercepted by a projection of rock which divides it and causes it to fall in two streams into a depression of the granite. At the sides of the ravine, huge overhanging masses of worn granite—some of them thousands of tons in weight, give rise to numerous recesses of sepulchral gloom. Over their portals hang festoons of delicate climbing plants and feathery-fronded ferns grow in profusion, gum-trees, acacia, dogwood and others whose branches meeting overhead form a canopy which excludes the noontide sunshine. If I might venture to call to aid metrical composition I would describe it thus:—
Forth from its secret mountain source it flows
Through em’rald swamps and tangled ti-tree dells;
Now making music soft ’mong granite stones,
O’er-mantled with bright moss of green and gold;
Now stealing dreamlike, through deep sunless shades,
Where never ripple ruffled its cool breast.
Thus flowing sea-ward in its chequered course
Till where a deep dark chasm twixt two hills
All unexpected opens to the view.
There at the verge divided into twain
It plunges down into the gloom profound
Where noise and mist and wild confusion reign.