LADY NIAGARA

Evening Star, Issue 21037, 26 February 1932, Page 16

LADY NIAGARA

GODDESS OF HONEYMOONS

Miss Elizabeth Belloc, daughter of Mr Hilare Belloc, most evidently inherits the gifts of her distinguished father. In this original and graphic article in the ‘ News-Chronicle ’, she manifests qualities as an observer and a writer worthy of Mr Belloc’s daughter:— 1 To hear the voice of Niagara before you actually see the falls is an experience from the very core of terror. Its voice is the deepest note in Nature, a rumble lower than thunder, and the moment you hear it you know that you are listening to something outside ordinary experience, to something beyond .the known human scale of sound.

There is a threat lurking in it somewhere, a threat of annihilation; and unlike thunder, which crashes to its crisis and falls silent, this more-than-thunder-ous threat continues and goes on. A brilliant professor of acoustics from the American Steel and Wire Company has photographed the sound of Niagara.

He set a sensitive instrument at the foot of the falls, and its moving finger of light traced the,line of sound upon photographic paper. The line rises and falls like a lino of hills, and along it there appear marks like a Lilliputian army marching in column with bayonets fixed, and now and again a banner flying. The bayonet marks are the sound of the billions of hissing drops, the banners are the instrument’s answer to the roar of the water against the rocks; but the wavy line as _of hilltops, now rising, now falling, is the essential voice of Niagara, the dreadful booming which comes from the rock wall behind the curtain of water.

“It is a general, pervading, continuous bass tone,” says Dr White, who made the experiment. “It has a definite second harmonic, one octave higher, following the vise and fall of the ground tone. At its lowest, this is the deepest bass tone I have heard yet in natural phenomena.”. So much for Niagara’s masculine voice. But when, with that ■ voice thundering in' your ears, you come across the bridge and see the falls at last, you draw a breath of relief. They are not terrifying at all! Only incredibly beautiful, even graceful, “ Lady Niagara ” they call her. And she is a court lady, too, in her dress a glacier green, strung with diamonds; with her fine-spun veil of foam and her nodding plumes of spray. She is festive, delicate, lovely.

No wonder the lovers of a whole continent come here for their honeymoons. Those bridal veils of Niagara, forever flying in the wind of their own going, bx-eathe a blessing of perpetual freshness upon the brides who come with their bridegrooms to marvel at Niagara, Never was there such a town for lovers. Two and two they go along the terraces of the park facing the falls; there are pairs of them hand in hand among the trees; pairs of them whispering on tho benches; pairs of them arm-in-arm on the deck of the little boat which staggers up against the current as near as it dares to go to the great x-oaring green wall of water. There is a gallery cut in the rock under the falls, where you go down fantastically dressed from head to foot in black waterproof. I was third to the inevitable pair of lovers there, and we looked out through the Great Cascade Portal across which the water thunders down in an opaque white mass, hiding everything from terrified human sight except one glimpse, high up, of the jewel-green crest of the falls, gleaming against the sky like the ridge of a faery hill.

From among the million flying drops which swirl excitedly round the portal 1 looked back, wet, but happy, to see what the lovers thought of it all. But they were not looking at the falls. They were looking at one another.

“ Truly,” I thought, as I discreetly withdrew down the gnome-like gallery, “ many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

Above the falls, on the Canadian side, where the rapids come down like spilt skies, there are three huge, solemn temples to the water-god, where a smooth, mechanical roar fights tho voice of the falls; and through the stately windows, between the grey pillars, there appears the gleam of machinery. These are the power-houses of Niagara, and part of the terrific force thus harnessed is used for the lights which are turned upon Niagara at night. Woman-like, she lights the' candle which illumines her fair face. .

The coloured lights are too artificial, only delightful because of tho innumerable moths which come out of the summer night to fly dazed but enchanted in tho great shafts of yellow and crimson and mauve, their wings dyed by it as if for a fancy dress ball. But the white floodlight on Niagara is a fairy vision. Out of the darkness she leaps suddenly, godlike in her fearful volume, and plunges down in a vast semi-circle of blinding snow. Her mighty green columns flash down with the speed of lightning, while the enormous clouds of spray rise slowly, very slowly, out of the roaring amphitheatre of water and light. They breathe and tremble ecstatically, rising as if from the heart- of dreamy leisure, pausing about the rainbow which shivers, manycoloured, across them. But from beneath those slowly rising clouds of snow comes the cry of captive Niagara, eager to escape away into'the dark. Filling the night with freshness, with the cold breath of broken and troubled waters, she is gone in headlong flight, racing and swirling into the darkness and away, :