Where we stood the width is about two.
I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,--broadly burning, rather
than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
that sun, clear back to the first _avant-courier_ trace of purple
twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim--yes, as if it were the very
butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven--ran that wall, always
sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
might climb or sparrow fly,--so broad that it was just faint-lined like
the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,--so
lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice
surpassed our immediate _vis-a-vis_ in height.
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