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Waterfalls and cascades are not uncommon, as may be supposed in a country of so uneven a surface as that of the western coast. A remarkable one descends from the north side of Mount Pugong. The largest I have seen was brought from Tappanuli by Mr. James Moore of Arno's Vale in the north of Ireland. It is 3 feet 3 1/2 inches in its longest diameter, and 2 feet 1 1/4 inches across.
It was a tract of a hundred miles, more or less, across, mainly unbroken wildwood, cut up by rapid rivers, impossible of navigation, otherwise than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried from one sheet of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades, and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without roads, and, to a large extent, without paths.
Walking along the brink to the west she at last reached the upper end, where twelve days ago she had ascended, and where the brook, swollen by late rains, now gushed down the ledges in a series of murmuring cascades. Here she began her descent, and as the sun disappeared behind threatening clouds over the western mountains, she entered her home again.
To windward, the sprays fell from the height above noticed in the most wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls of the building in froth as white as snow.
"I stayed two days at George Selwyn's house, called Matson, which lies on Robin Hood's Hill; it is lofty enough for an Alp, yet it is a mountain of turf to the very top, has wood scattered all over it, springs that long to be cascades in twenty places of it, and from the summit of it beats even Sir George Lyttleton's views, by having the city of Gloucester at its foot, and the Severn widening to the horizon.
Far in the west rose upwards in the intense blue sky the snow-capped peaks of the Cordilleras, or Andes, of South America, with range beyond range of lofty mountains intervening, the more distant rugged and barren, the nearer clothed to their summits with trees, glittering cascades leaping down their side? from rock to rock; while here and there could be seen the openings of deep glens, at the bottom of which copious streams came rushing forth, forming the headwaters of the mighty Orinoco.
Through the centre of the verdure the Diamond Creek flowed dimpling over a pebbly bed, or shot in sparkles between barring bowlders, or plunged over shelves in toy cascades. The travellers had seen nothing so hospitable in nature since leaving the country of the Moquis weeks before. Sweeny screamed like a delighted child. "Oh! an' that's just like ould Oirland. Oh, luk at the turrf!
Perpetual shadow reigned on the northern and western faces of these towering Nights not enough warmth and sunshine reaching them in the cold months to check the growth of the ever-lengthening icicles hanging from the jutting cliffs, or melt the arabesque frost-forms with which the many dashing cascades decorated the adjacent rocks and shrubbery.
On the other side of the Valley, almost immediately opposite the Bridal Veil, there is another fine fall, considerably wider than the Veil when the snow is melting fast and more than 1000 feet in height, measured from the brow of the cliff where it first springs out into the air to the head of the rocky talus on which it strikes and is broken up into ragged cascades.
In one spot the wooded slope enclosed a very picturesque scene: a brook, flowing through a ravine in the high bank, fell in many little cascades to the broad river beneath, its margins decked out with an infinite variety of beautiful plants.
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