26 TRADITIONAL msronv or

propitiate the favor of their Monitas. The eye instantly searches along the eternal rampart, for a single place of security; but the search is vain. With an impas- sable barrier of rocks on one side, and an interminable expanse of water on the other, a sudden storm upon the lake would as inevitably assure destruction of the passenger in his frail canoe, as if he were on the brink of the cataract of Niagara.

“ The rock itself is a sand-stone, which is disinte- grated by the continual action of the water with com- parative facility. There are no broken masses upon which the eye can rest and find relief. The lake is so deep, that these masses, as they are torn from the precipice, are concealed beneath its waters until it is reduced to sand. The action of the waves has removed every projecting point.

“When we passed this immense fabric of nature,

' the wind was still and the lake was calm. But even

the slightest motion of the waves, which in the most profound calm agitates these eternal seas, swept through the deep caverns with the noise of the distant thunder, and died away upon the ear, as it rolled forward in the dark recesses inaccessible to human observation.

“No sound more melancholy or more awful ever vibrated upon human nerves. It has left an impres-

sion which neither time nor distance can ever efface. “Resting in a frail bark canoe, upon the limpid