London, April to September 1822
I STAYED two days in the Indian village, where I wrote another letter to M. de Malesherbes. The Indian women busied themselves with various tasks, while their infants slept suspended in large wicker nets hung from the arms of a purple beech. The grass was covered with dew, the wind carried with it the scent of the woods, and the native cotton plants, spilling over with white capsules, looked like white rose bushes. The breeze rocked the children’s aerial cradles almost imperceptibly. From time to time, the mothers glanced over their shoulders to see whether their children were still asleep, or whether they had been woken by the birds. From this Indian village to the Falls, it was about three or four leagues. It would take as many hours for my guide and me to reach them. Six miles away, a column of mist already showed me the place where the waters tumbled low. My heart pounded with a joy mixed with terror as I entered those woods that hid from view one of the greatest spectacles nature has offered mankind.
We dismounted. Leading our horses by the bridle, we traveled across glades and thickets to the bank of the Niagara River, seven or eight hundred paces above the Falls. I was walking relentlessly forward when my guide seized me by the arm; he stopped me at the very edge of the water, which flowed past at the speed of an arrow. It did not foam at all but glided in a single mass over the rocky slope. Its silence before the Falls contrasted wildly with the roar of the Falls themselves. Scripture often compares a people to great waters; here, it was a dying people, who, deprived of their voice by long struggle, were now hurling themselves into the abyss of eternity.
The guide still held onto me, for I felt myself drawn, so to speak, by the river: I had an involuntary desire to throw myself in. I cast my eyes first upstream, to the riverbanks, then downstream, to the island that divided the waters and where these waters suddenly ceased to be, as if they had been cleft in the sky.
After a quarter of an hour of perplexity and inexpressible admiration, I made my way to the Falls. One can consult the Essai historique and Atala for the two descriptions I have made of them. Today, highways lead to the cataract. There are inns on both the American and the English banks, and mills and factories below the chasm.
I could not convey the thoughts that stirred in me at the sight of such a sublime disorder. In the desert of my early life, I had to invent people to decorate the wastes around me; I drew on my own substance to make beings that I did not find elsewhere, and I carried these beings within me. Thus I placed the recollections of Atala and René on the banks of Niagara to express their sadness. For what is a cascade that falls eternally before the insensible face of the earth and the sky, if human nature is not there with its motives and its misery? How joyless to be submerged in that solitude of waters and mountains and then not know whom to tell about this great spectacle! To have the waves, the rocks, the woods, and the mountain streams to oneself alone! Give the soul a companion, and the smiling verdure of the hills, and the cool breath of the mist, will enrapture it. The day’s journey, the sweet repose at its end, the rocking of the waves, the soft slumber on the moss—these things will draw the deepest tenderness from the human heart. I have seated Velléda on the shores of Armorica, Cymodocée under the porticos of Athens, and Blanca in the halls of the Alhambra. Alexander created cities wherever he roamed: I have left dreams wherever I have dragged my weary days.
I have seen the cascades of the Alps with their chamoises and those of the Pyrenees with their izards; I have not gone far enough up the Nile to see its cataracts, which are no more than rapids; and I will not speak of the azure zones of Terni and Tivoli, those elegant lines of ruins fit for the poet’s song:
Et praeceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus.[7]
Niagara eclipses them all. I contemplated this waterfall that was revealed to the Old World, not by lowly little travelers like myself, but by missionaries who, searching for God in these solitudes, threw themselves on their knees at the sight of nature’s marvels, and were martyred while they sang their hymns of praise. Our priests hailed the beautiful sites of America and consecrated them with their blood; our soldiers clapped their hands at the ruins of Thebes and presented arms in Andalusia: the whole genius of France lies in the double militia of our camps and our altars.
I was holding my horse’s bridle twisted around my arm, when a rattlesnake rustled in the undergrowth. My startled horse reared and recoiled toward the Falls. I could not seem to untangle my arm from the reins. The horse, growing more and more frightened, dragged me after him. Already his forefeet were off the ground; poised over the brink of the abyss, he kept himself from falling only by the strength of his loins. It was all over for me, when suddenly the animal, astonished by this new danger, pirouetted back to dry ground. If I had left this life in the Canadian woods, would my soul have brought to the supreme tribunal any sacrifices, or any good works, or any virtues, like those of Father Jogues and Father Lallemand? Or would I have died with nothing to show but empty days and miserable illusions?
This was not the only risk I ran at Niagara. To get to the lower basin of the Falls, the savages used a ladder of vines, which was at that time broken. Desirous to see the height of the cataract from below, and despite my guide’s protestations, I ventured down the side of an almost perpendicular rock. Ignoring the roar of the water that frothed below me, I kept my head and succeeded in getting about forty feet from the bottom. At that point, the bare and vertical stone offered nothing more for me to grip. So I remained, hanging by one hand from the last available root, and feeling my fingers gradually giving way beneath the weight of my body: there are few men who have counted two minutes of their lives as I counted those. At last my exhausted hand let go, and I fell. By an incredible stroke of good fortune, I found myself on a ledge of rock, upon which I should have been broken a thousand times, and I did not even feel great pain. I was half a foot from the abyss, but somehow I had not rolled into it. When the cold and the damp began to work upon me, however, I discerned that I had not gotten away so cheaply after all: I had broken my left arm above the elbow. The guide, who was looking down at me from above and to whom I was making signals of distress, ran off to find the savages. They hoisted me up on a rope along an otter path and carried me to their village. It was only a simple fracture. Two splints, a bandage, and a sling sufficed for my cure.