She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the
slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at
hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and
transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;
there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all
along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a
wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it
certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made
her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral
mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,
swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a
spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking
down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch
between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside
sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten
thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone
overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness
of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall
and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and
rapid-running river.
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