The quebrada, or gorge, is here two hundred and sixty feet deep; in the narrowest part it is choked to a minimum breadth of fifty-one feet. It is filled with what seems not water but froth and milk, a dashing and dazzling, a whirling and churning surfaceless mass, which gives a wondrous study of fluid in motion. Here the luminous whiteness of the chaotic foam-crests, hurled in billows and breakers against the blackness of the rock, is burst into flakes and spray that leap half-way up the immuring trough. Then the steam boils over and canopies the tremendous
scene. In the stilly air of dull, warm grey, the mists surge up, deepening still more the dizzy fall that yawns under our feet.
The general effect of the picture, and the same may be said of all great cataracts, is the realised idea of power—of power tremendous, inexorable, irresistible. The eye is spell-bound by the contrast of this impetuous motion, this wrathful, maddened haste to escape, with the frail stedfastness of the bits of rainbow, hovering above, with the “Table Rock,” so solid to the tread, and with the placid, settled stillness of the plain and hillocks, whose eternal homes seem to be here. Magic, I may observe, is in the atmosphere of Paulo Affonso; it is the natural expression of the glory and the majesty, the splendour and the glamour of the scene, which Greece would have peopled with shapes of beauty, and which in Germany would be haunted by choirs of flying sylphs and dancing Undines.
I sat over the cataract until convinced it was not possible to become one with the waters; what at first seemed grand and sublime had at last a feeling of awe, too intense to be in any way enjoyable. The rest of the day I spent in camp, where the minor troubles of life soon asserted their power. The sand raised by the strong and steady trade-wind was troublesome, and the surface seething in the sun produced a constant drought. We were now at the head of the funnel, the vast ventilator which guides the gale to the Rio de São Francisco. At night the sky showed a fast-drifting scud, and an angry blast dispersed the gathering
clouds of blood-thirsty mosquitos. Our lullaby was the music of Paulo Affonso.
The next day I visited the falls again and explored them thoroughly, going down from the heights above to the base beneath, from which the finest view of the falls was to be obtained. It was a grand climax to my voyage down the São Francisco.
My task was done; I won its reward, and my strength passed from me. Two days of tedious mountain riding led to the Porto das Piranhas, and from here I descended the lower Rio de São Francisco more leisurely, and, when that was done, I finally returned viâ Rio de Janeiro to Santos (São Paulo), alias the Wapping of the Far West, and took up my consular duties once again.