" My mare touched ground twice, and was carried off again
before she fairly got to land some yards nearer the sea than the
bridle track.
When our tired horses were taking breath I felt as if my heart
stopped, and I trembled all over, for we had narrowly escaped death.
I then put our saddle-bags on Deborah's horse. It was one of the
worst and steepest of the palis that we had to ascend; but I can't
remember anything about the road except that we had to leap some
place which we could not cross otherwise. Deborah, then thoroughly
alive to a sense of risk, said that there was only one more bad
gulch to cross before we reached Onomea, but it was the most
dangerous of all, and we could not get across, she feared, but we
might go and look at it. I only remember the extreme solitude of
the region, and scrambling and sliding down a most precipitous pali,
hearing a roar like cataract upon cataract, and coming suddenly down
upon a sublime and picturesque scene, with only standing room, and
that knee-deep in water, between a savage torrent and the cliff.
This gulch, called the Scotchman's gulch, I am told, because a
Scotchman was drowned there, must be at its crossing three-quarters
of a mile inland, and three hundred feet above the sea.
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