THE GREAT FOURFOLD WATERFALL IN INDIA.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5319, 13 April 1878, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE GREAT FOURFOLD WATERFALL IN INDIA.

(From Fraser's Magazine.) These are the falls of Garsopjm, not so famous as they should he, for nowhere the world throughout can there be such another vision. From the lip of the precipice to the dark pools at its foot is an accurately measured distance of 830 ft., more than twice the height of the top of the cross that surmounts St. Paul’s Cathedral, and down this prodigious descent pour the four cataracts, each arrayed in its own special robes of grandeur and beauty. First on the western side is the Great er Rajah Fall ; a branch of the . river runs over a projecting ledge, and nowhere touching the Titanic wall, which hollowst in, descends in a stately unbroken column, gradually widening its shining skirts, into a black unfathomable pool, 830 ft. below. Imperially sublime, the transfigured water passes with majestic calmness through the void in fold after fold of ermine whiteness, spreading out its magnificence as it silently nears the end. The precipice runs backward, curving in an irregular bay, on whose farther side the next fall, named the Roarer, shoots slanting down a third of the height into a rocky basin that shoulders out, whence it boils out in a broad massive cataract, plunging 500 ft. into the same pool opposite its kingly neighbor. 'All the thunder and madness of the element are gathered in this writhing headlong flood, and it is the voice of its fury that comes up from the abyss, like the roar and tumult of hurrying multitudes in the face of some great monarch moving to his doom. Leaving the bay, next on the general plane of the precipice comes the Rocket Fall, nmuing impetuously

over the brim and down the face of the stupendous wall, to which it only just clings with a broad band of glistening foam-white water, speeding in quick gushes incessantly darting out myriads of watery rockets and , vaporous arrows, with which all its volume seems alive, and pouring clear at last in a dense shining curtain into its own pool. Last and loveliest, La Dame Blanche glides down the grim colossal rampart in lapse after lapse of delicate lace-like veils, now blowing out in bright misty spray and again quickly gathering up the white folds, and so stealing downward with a whispering murmur, till gently sinking in a sparkling shower into a pool whose inkblack surface is hardly raffled. At a point a furlong or two below the falls on the further side of the mighty ravine. that cleaves the mountains from their feet, a platform has been hewn in the rock whence the whole overpowering precipice and the four falls are disclosed from top to bottom; the eye at once takes in the sublime column of the great fall, the wild tumultuous plunge of the Roarer, the impetuous gush and foam-sheaves of the Rocket, and the hesitating tremulous beauty of La Dame Blanche. All round the world there can be nothing to match the sight. The opposite side of the profound ravine, which maintains a uniform width and depth as far as seen, rising in tree-crowned crests higher than the line of the falls, sinks in a perpendicular drop of stern grey walls |for more than a ' thousand feet to the floor of the colossal chasm; only here and there a dark rent or stunted tree rooted in a creyice breaks the awful uniformity. .On the side where we sit the slopes,- densely forest-clad, descend with only less than precipitous steepness. Looking down the ravine, the gaunt rocky faces gradually disappear, and a majestic wooded mountain closes the view. But one cannot turn long from the sublime, vision of’ the falls, and the long pillars of bright water —too long to be taken in at a glance, the eye must follow them —bathed in light, as the Indian sun darts its radiance to their feet. Small trees, patches of herbage and grassy shelves, kept fresh by the spray rain, soften the front of the abyss about the Rocket and the White Lady ; hut gdoomy cavernous recesses, which no sunshine reaches, lie hid behind the Great Fall as it pours from its beetling rim. Above in the background the higher summits of the mountains lift green peaks and darkly-wooded crests into mid-air, and at the bottom of the falls a sunbow, ever rising slowly higher as the sun's rays penetrate deeper, arches the dark pools with its beautiful soft splendour. In the morning it lies long and low, hut ascends with the sun, and after noontide spans the ravine with a glorious lofty semicircle. Not much mistcloud arises except where the Roarer hurls down its massive volume, hut the air is laden with moisture, and often flashes with brilliant colors, as blasts of wind below scatter for a moment the symmetry of the sunbow, and fling wider the shining robe of the Great Fall. No, there can be nothing comparable to it elsewhere. The Staubhach dropping its single smoke-like veil from as lofty a brow, and the enormous flood and breadth and massiveness of Niagara, far less in height, belong to a different order of sublimity. The many torrents of the Zambezi Falls descend but 100 ft. into a long narrow fissure, “ a gigantic crack” only 80ft. across. One hears of marvellous cataracts a mong Norwegian hills and in Californian valleys, but nowhere else are all the vyonders and enchantments of water in every aspect of grace and beauty, force, majesty, and terror, so gathered and set in such a frame of surpassing sublimity and awful grandeur amid all the magnificence of tropical mountain scenery.