I was getting myself sunburned, stretched out on the warm dry rocks.
Down over the steep edge, somewhere near the foot of the next descent I
heard the pipes of Pan. Why should I dress and go?
I made my shoes and clothes into a bundle, and threw them down the
cliff and climbed over, clinging to the steep by mere twigs. I seemed
to hear the piping as I approached the terrace at the fall’s base. Then
the sound of music blended with the stream’s strange voice and I turned
to merge myself again with its waters.
Against the leaning wall of the cliff I placed my shoulders. The
descending current smote me, wrestling with wildwood laughter,
threatening to crush me and hurl me to the base of the mountain. But
just as before my feet were well set in a notch of the cliff that went
across the stream, cut there a million years ago.
It was a curious combination to discover, this stream-wide notch, and
above it this wall with the water spread like a crystal robe over
it. In the centre of the fall a Cyclops could have stood to bathe,
and on the edge was the same provision in miniature for feeble man.
And it was the more curious to find this plan repeated in detail by
successive cataracts of the cañon, unmistakably wrought by the slow
hand of geologic ages. And to see the water of the deep central stream
undisturbed in the midst of the fall and still crystalline, and to see
it slide down the steep incline and strike each notch at the foot with
sudden music and appalling foam, was more wonderful than the simple
telling can explain.
Each sheet of crystal that came over my shoulders seemed now to pour
into them rather than over them. I lifted my mouth and drank as a
desert bird drinks rain. My downstretched arms and extended fingers and
the spreading spray seemed one. My heart with its exultant blood seemed
but the curve of a cataract over the cliff of my soul.