THE TAKING OF HELEN :: and other prose selections

**This is not my work. see below for reference.**

Niagara

All the way, I had remembered the tales of the roar of the water, and how it can be heard for miles, but what I heard was only the train, and even when I stood in Niagara, within 500 yards of the American fall, I hardly heard it; what I heard was the rapids above the fall, which was picturesque and beautiful, in spite of the ice, yet perhaps nothing out of the way in the magnificent sense. They are a rush and a wild crying of rather clear greenish water much broken by falling and by rocks and by big Goat Island in the middle of the falls

I wandered down the stream and quite soon saw the edge, with the water going over the edge, and nothing beyond the edge except the Canadian shore 400 yards away. Just at the edge the water greened and went very fast; so I hurried up right to the rail by the brink, and as I came within ten yards (going in the direction of the stream) I heard the fall's big voice, and then, when I looked over the edge, it was really terrific.

It is all heaped and built up below with mounds and skulls of gigantic ice, with icicle teeth in their jaws. These mounds come up halfway the height of the falls, and the water goes down into a chasm among them, and ten yards down from the edge it ceases to look like water, infinitely strange and like the ghost of water, and fills the air with drops but is like teased wool and terror and God knows what; and out of the chasm comes a smoke of water, and this rises and flies about, overhead and everywhere, and fills the air with drops, and falls on the trees and freezes three inches thick.

For Helen Rogers.
from John Masefield. Nov 3rd. 1926.