De Noyan barely touched the food placed in front of him, and, long before Cairnes had completed his meal, the Chevalier was restlessly pacing the rocks beside the stream, casting impatient glances in our direction.
"_Mon Dieu_!" he ejaculated at last, "it is not the nature of a Frenchman to remain longer cooped in such a hole.

I beg you, Benteen, bid that gluttonous English animal cease stuffing himself like an anaconda, and let us get away; each moment I am compelled to bide here is torture." Experiencing the same tension, I persuaded the Puritan to suspend his onslaught, and, undisturbed by sight or sound, we began a slow advance, clambering across the bowlders strewing the narrow way, discovering as we moved forward that those towering cliffs on either side were becoming lower, although no possibility of scaling them became apparent.

We travelled thus upwards of a quarter of a mile, our progress being necessarily slow, when a dull roar stole gradually upon our hearing.

A moment later, rounding a sharp edge of projecting rock, and picking our way cautiously along a narrow slab of stone extending out above the swirling water, we came forth in full view of a vast cliff, with unbroken front extending from wall to wall across the gorge, while over it plunged the stream in a magnificent leap of fully one hundred and fifty feet.

It was a scene of rare, romantic beauty, the boiling stream surging and dancing madly away from its foot, and the multicolored mists rising up like a gauzy veil between us and the column of greenish-blue water.