King found Niagara pitched to the key of his lacerated and tumultuous feelings. There were few people at the Cataract House, and either the bridal season had not set in, or in America a bride has been evolved who does not show any consciousness of her new position. In his present mood the place seemed deserted, the figures of the few visitors gliding about as in a dream, as if they too had been subdued by the recent commission which had silenced the drivers, and stopped the mills, and made the park free, and was tearing down the presumptuous structures along the bank. In this silence, which emphasized the quaking of the earth and air, there was a sense of unknown, impending disaster. It was not to be borne indoors, and the two friends went out into the night.
On the edge of the rapids, above the hotel, the old bath-house was in process of demolition, its shaking piazza almost overhanging the flood. Not much could be seen from it, but it was in the midst of an elemental uproar. Some electric lamps shining through the trees made high lights on the crests of the rapids, while the others near were in shadow and dark. The black mass of Goat Island appeared under the lightning flashes in the northwest sky, and whenever these quick gleams pierced the gloom the frail bridge to the island was outlined for a moment, and then vanished as if it had been swept away, and there could only be seen sparks of light in the houses on the Canadian shore, which seemed very near. In this unknown, which was rather felt than seen, there was a sense of power and of mystery which overcame the mind; and in the black night the roar, the cruel haste of the rapids, tossing white gleams and hurrying to the fatal plunge, begat a sort of terror in the spectators. It was a power implacable, vengeful, not to be measured. They strolled down to Prospect Park. The gate was closed; it had been the scene of an awful tragedy but a few minutes before. They did not know it, but they knew that the air shuddered, and as they skirted the grounds along the way to the foot-bridge the roar grew in their stunned ears. There, projected out into the night, were the cables of steel holding the frail platform over the abyss of night and terror. Beyond was Canada. There was light enough in the sky to reveal, but not to dissipate, the appalling insecurity. What an impious thing it seemed to them, this trembling structure across the chasm! They advanced upon it. There were gleams 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 room quivered, the roar filled all the air. Is not life real and terrible enough, he asked himself, but that brides must cast this experience also into their honeymoon?
The morning light did not efface the impressions of the night, the dominating presence of a gigantic, pitiless force, a blind passion of nature, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Shut the windows and lock the door, you could not shut out the terror of it. The town did not seem safe; the bridges, the buildings on the edge of the precipices with their shaking casements, the islands, might at any moment be engulfed and disappear. It was a thing to flee from.
I suspect King was in a very sensitive mood; the world seemed for the moment devoid of human sympathy, and the savageness and turmoil played upon his bare nerves. The artist himself shrank from contact with this overpowering display, and said that he could not endure more than a day or two of it. It needed all the sunshine in the face of Miss Lamont and the serenity of her cheerful nature to make the situation tolerable, and even her sprightliness was somewhat subdued. It was a day of big, broken, high-sailing clouds, with a deep blue sky and strong sunlight. The slight bridge to Goat Island appeared more presumptuous by daylight, and the sharp slope of the rapids above it gave a new sense of the impetuosity of the torrent. As they walked slowly on, past the now abandoned paper-mills and the other human impertinences, the elemental turmoil increased, and they seemed entering a world the foundations of which were broken up. This must have been a good deal a matter of impression, for other parties of sightseers were coming and going, apparently unawed, and intent simply on visiting every point spoken of in the guide-book, and probably unconscious of the all-pervading terror. But King could not escape it, even in the throng descending and ascending the stairway to Luna Island. Standing upon the platform at the top, he realized for the first time the immense might of the downpour of the American Fall, and noted the pale green color, with here and there a violet tone, and the white cloud mass spurting out from the solid color. On the foam-crested river lay a rainbow forming nearly a complete circle. The little steamer Maid of the Mist was coming up, riding the waves, dashed here and there by conflicting currents, but resolutely steaming on—such is the audacity of man—and poking her venturesome nose into the boiling foam under the Horseshoe. On the deck are pigmy passengers in oil-skin suits, clumsy figures, like arctic explorers. The boat tosses about like a chip, it hesitates and quivers, and then, slowly swinging, darts away down the current, fleeing from the wrath of the waters, and pursued by the angry roar.
Surely it is an island of magic, unsubstantial, liable to go adrift and plunge into the canon. Even in the forest path, where the great tree trunks assure one of stability and long immunity, this feeling cannot be shaken off. Our party descended the winding staircase in the tower, and walked on the shelf under the mighty ledge to the entrance of the Cave of the Winds. The curtain of water covering this entrance was blown back and forth by the wind, now leaving the platform dry and now deluging it. A woman in the pathway was beckoning frantically and calling to a man who stood on the platform, entirely unconscious of danger, looking up to the green curtain and down into the boiling mist. It was Mrs. Stubbs; but she was shouting against Niagara, and her husband mistook her pantomime for gestures of wonder and admiration. Some moments passed, and then the curtain swung in, and tons of water drenched the Englishman, and for an instant hid him from sight. Then, as the curtain swung back, he was seen clinging to the handrail, sputtering and astonished at such treatment. He came up the bank dripping, and declaring that it was extraordinary, most extraordinary, but he wouldn't have missed it for the world. From this platform one looks down the narrow, slippery stairs that are lost in the boiling mist, and wonders at the daring that built these steps down into that hell, and carried the frail walk of planks over the bowlders outside the fall. A party in oil-skins, making their way there, looked like lost men and women in a Dante Inferno. The turbulent waters dashed all about them; the mist occasionally wrapped them from sight; they clung to the rails, they tried to speak to each other; their gestures seemed motions of despair. Could that be Eurydice whom the rough guide was tenderly dragging out of the hell of waters, up the stony path, that singular figure in oil-skin trousers, who disclosed a pretty face inside her hood as she emerged? One might venture into the infernal regions to rescue such a woman; but why take her there? The group of adventurers stopped a moment on the platform, with the opening into the misty cavern for a background, and the artist said that the picture was, beyond all power of the pencil, strange and fantastic. There is nothing, after all, that the human race will not dare for a new sensation.
The walk around Goat Island is probably unsurpassed in the world for wonder and beauty. The Americans have every reason to be satisfied with their share of the fall; they get nowhere one single grand view like that from the Canada side, but infinitely the deepest impression of majesty and power is obtained on Goat Island. There the spectator is in the midst of the war of nature. From the point over the Horseshoe Fall our friends, speaking not much, but more and more deeply moved, strolled along in the lovely forest, in a rural solemnity, in a local calm, almost a seclusion, except for the ever-present shuddering roar in the air. On the shore above the Horseshoe they first comprehended the breadth, the great sweep, of the rapids. The white crests of the waves in the west were coming out from under a black, lowering sky; all the foreground was in bright sunlight, dancing, sparkling, leaping, hurrying on, converging to the angle where the water becomes a deep emerald at the break and plunge. The rapids above are a series of shelves, bristling with jutting rocks and lodged trunks of trees, and the wildness of the scene is intensified by the ragged fringe of evergreens on the opposite shore.