All the winged creation, great and small, were fast
hastening to the cover of the leaves and branches of the trees. The
cattle were speeding to the hollows under the impending rocks; negroes,
men, women, and children, were hurrying with their hoes on their
shoulders past the windows to their huts. Several large bloodhounds had
ventured into the hall, and were crouching with a low whine at our feet.
The huge carrion crows were the only living things which seemed to brave
the approaching chubasco, and were soaring high up in the heavens,
appearing to touch the black agitated fringe of the lowering
thunderclouds. All other kinds of winged creatures, parrots, and
pigeons, and cranes, had vanished by this time under the thickest trees,
and into the deepest coverts, and the wild--ducks were shooting past in
long lines, piercing the thick air with outstretched neck and clanging
wing.
Suddenly the wind fell, and the sound of the waterfall increased, and
grew rough and loud, and the undefinable rushing noise that precedes a
heavy fall of rain in the tropics, the voice of the wilderness, moaned
through the high woods, until at length the clouds sank upon the valley
in boiling mists, rolling halfway down the surrounding hills; and the
water of the stream, whose scanty rill but an instant before hissed over
the precipice, in a small transparent ribbon of clear glass--green,
sprinkled with white foam, and then threaded its way round the large
rocks in its capacious channel, like a silver eel twisting through a dry
desert, now changed in a moment to a dark turgid chocolate colour; and
even as we stood and looked, lo! a column of water from the mountains
pitched in thunder over the face of the precipice, making the earth
tremble, and driving up from the rugged face of the everlasting rocks in
smoke, and forcing the air into eddies and sudden blasts which tossed
the branches of the trees that overhung it, as they were dimly seen
through clouds of drizzle, as if they had been shaken by a tempest,
although there was not a breath stirring elsewhere out of heaven; while
little wavering spiral wreaths of mist rose up thick from the surface of
the boiling pool at the bottom of the cataract, like miniature water
spouts, until they were dispersed by the agitation of the air above.
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