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There was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves again.

I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my sight.

After all, I do not know that the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of the scene; for it is very grand, this fissure through the cliff, with a steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on which trees and shrubbery have grown.

We might suppose it the bottom of a well; it is a miniature garden no bigger than the opening of an oubliette, overhung on all sides by the crushing height of the mountain and receiving from on high but the dim light of dreamland. Nevertheless, here is simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands.

"But if he's lived in Alaska, a Cascade blizzard would just be a light breeze to him." He paused to put a huge stick of wood in the stove, then, after the habit of solitary humanity, resumed his soliloquy. "I bet he's seen life. I bet, whoever he is, he's somewheres near the top of the ladder. I bet, in a bunch of men, he does the thinking.

These two streams flowed away on either side of the enclosed space, one towards the north, and the other, the course of which we had been following, round the base of the mountain. At each terrace they made a cascade, so that the traveller approaching had a view of eight waterfalls at once.

This was nothing more nor less than the organization of a second pack-outfit and the crossing of the Cascade Mountains on horseback by a virgin route. The Head, Bob, and Joe had many discussions about it. I do not recall that my advice was ever asked. It is generally taken for granted in these wilderness-trips of ours that I will be there, ready to get a story when the opportunity presents itself.

Black cliffs overhang it, full of the black mouths of caves; great trees overhang the cliffs, and dangle-down lianas; and in one place, about the middle, a big brook pours over in a cascade. Well, there was a boat going by here, with six young men of Falesá, "all very pretty," Uma said, which was the loss of them.

"Good and hard, except for the slush at the Boiler and another stretch just below the Cascade." Lapierre rolled a cigarette. "Hear you caught MacNair with the goods at last," he ventured. Ripley nodded. "Looks like it," he admitted. "But what do you mean, 'at last'?" The quarter-breed laughed lightly and blew a cloud of cigarette-smoke ceilingward.

In a heavy thunder-storm, accompanied by a deluging rain, which I witnessed at Mount Sinai in the month of May, a large stream of water poured, in an almost continuous cascade, down the steep ravine north of the convent, by which travellers sometimes descend from the plateau between the two peaks, but after reaching the foot of the mountain, it flowed but a few yards before it was swallowed up in the sands.