From these bright labyrinths we emerge again into open daylight. Here, above the basin, warm cliffs uphold a tablet where sunlight may blazon its last fond inscriptions. Other hieroglyphs are already there, — the story of the rock’s own life told in crevice, ledge, and mossy cleft, and the myriad traces of Time, the destroyer and renewer. As air above, so water below has pencilled its legend. Lapping ripples have marked levels of drought and freshet along its base. And the cliffs, doing their part in this interchange of bland influences, send down their image to hang without heaviness in the shimmering water. The still water reflects, as perfectly as the arrowy, shattered water contained, light. How full of mild splendor is this pool of Nepenthe! Into its amphitheatre the river leaps exulting. A maze of woven sunbeams floats above her bold repetition of feats done in her youth among argent snows. She springs out upon her own image, which falls before her, a column of white lustre lengthening over the undulations, only to break in the swift silvery bends of the lower rapid. And above this wavering image Iris floats within her veil of mist, and her bright hues shine through it. The cataract sheds prismatic tints upon the unsunlit cliffs, and the cliffs that are in sunlight shed radiance upon the air. The void is flooded with a glow of reflected lights. All about, trees stoop over the brink and tassel the precipices with tendrils and pendent branches. Delicious spot, which he who will can
