rapidly rushing water, and the many large pebbles it carries.  Just at the very brink of the rock, a low natural arch has been eroded, and over this the stream leaps almost perpendicularly into the deep straight-walled canon below.  The height of the cascade has been measured by a mining expert at Pinos Altos, and found to be 980 feet.  Set in the most picturesque, noble environments, the fall is certainly worth a visit.

I arrived at its head just as the last rays of the setting sun were gilding the tops of the mountains all around.  The scenery was beautiful beyond description.  Above and around towered silent, solemn old pine-trees, while:  the chasm deep down was suffused with a purple glow.  About midway down the water turns into spray and reaches the bottom as silently as an evening shower, but as it recovers itself forms numerous whirlpools and rapids, rushing through the narrow gorge with an incessant roar.  When the river is full, during the wet season, the cascade must present a splendid sight.

I wanted to see the fall from below.  The guide, an elderly man, reminded me that the sun was setting, and warned me that the distance was greater than it seemed.  We should stumble and fall, he said, in the dark.  But as I insisted on going, he put me on the track, and I started on a rapid run, jumping from stone to stone, zigzagging my way down the mountainside.  The entire scenery, the wild, precipitous rocks, the stony, crooked path, the roaring stream below—­everything reminded me of mountains in Norway, where I had run along many a saeter path through the twilight, alone, just as I was running now.

As luck would have it, I met an Indian boy coming up from the river, Where he had been trout fishing, and I asked him to accompany me, which he did.  About half-way down we arrived at a little promontory from which the fall could be seen very well.  The rock seemed to be here the same as on top, showing no sign of stratification.  A few yards from the point we had reached was a spring, and here we made a fire and waited for the moon to rise.  To make him more talkative, I gave the boy a cigarette.  He spoke only Spanish, and he told me that he had neither father nor mother, and when his uncle died he was quite alone in the world; but a Mexican family brought him up, and he seemed to have been treated well.  At present he was paying two dollars a month for his board, earning the money by selling grass in Pinos Altos.

At nine o’clock we began to ascend through the moonlit landscape.  I had left my mule some hundred yards from the fall, and here I also found the guide.  At two o’clock in the morning I arrived at my camp.