The fissure is very
irregular, so as not to be describable in words, and scarcely to be
painted,--jetting buttresses, moss-grown, impending crags, with tall
trees growing on their verge, nodding over the head of the observer at
the bottom of the chasm, and rooted, as it were, in air. The part where
the water works its way down is very narrow; but the chasm widens, after
the descent, so as to form a spacious chamber between the crags, open to
the sky, and its floor is strewn with fallen fragments of marble, and
trees that have been precipitated long ago, and are heaped with
drift-wood, left there by the freshets, when the scanty stream becomes
a considerable waterfall. One crag, with a narrow ridge, which might be
climbed without much difficulty, protrudes from the middle of the rock,
and divides the fall. The passage through the cave made by the stream is
very crooked, and interrupted, not only by fallen wrecks, but by deep
pools of water, which probably have been forded by few. As the deepest
pool occurs in the most uneven part of the chasm, where the hollows in
the sides of the crag are deepest, so that each hollow is almost a cave
by itself, I determined to wade through it.
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