北京市日坛中学  谭菁

The Niagara Falls are located in east central North America, on a river that connected two of the five Great Lakes. The Nia-gara consists of two parts: the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side of the river, and the American Falls on the United States' side. They are about 50 Meters high, 1240 meters wide. The Niagara's large volume of flow, averaging about 6000 cube meters per second, plus its steep drop, gives the river great power poten-tial.

I visited the great Niagara Falls a couple of years earlier. We reached the little town of Buffalo¹ at seven o'clock in the evening. The town was already deserted². It shocked me because it was so different from the last place I visited, which happened to be New York City. We settled into a motel, then went straight to see the Falls.

Actually, we didn't see the falls first, but heard them. It was the sound of thunderbolts and everything in that area seemed to be shaking. The sound became more and more incredible, then fi-nally the famous Horseshoe Falls and the American Falls showed up. They lit the falls up from the Canadian side at night. We saw the falls turning red, then yellow, then purple green... the beams of lights made it all look unreal, plus the mist rising from the bottom, I felt very much like Alice in Wonderland.

The next morning we went over again, to see the Niagara Falls in daylight. Dad and I were on a bridge some miles down river. There we could see the skyline on the Canadian side, and even Toronto appearing just above the horizon, so far away from us that we could barely see it—or maybe it was because of that thick layer of mist hanging around the entire fall region.

The most exciting part of the trip was on board the tour boat Maid of the Mist. It was a hot summer day in late June. I wore only short-sleeves and shorts. And I was surprised when the ship crew handed me this thick yellow plastic raincoat and urged me to put it on. The ship started, then it seemed to me that we, along with the boat, went straight INTO the falls. The sound was deaf-ening , and water splattered everywhere. No matter how tight I tried to wrap the raincoat around me, I was soaked anyway, and the water was shockingly chilling. It went right into the bones! Now I understood why they insisted on me putting on the rain-coat, and I just wished that I had asked them to give me another. Anyhow it was a real spectacular sight. On board Maid of the Mist, I was fascinated by the beauty of the Falls, and over-whelmed by the power of nature and comparing to it, how tiny we were.

Mom has been there during wintertime. She told me that when the wind blew so strongly in one direction, the damp mois-ture at the bottom of the Falls was carried inland. Then it would crystallize on the conifers alongside the river. After a while the trees would get too heavy on one side, they would all bend down in the same direction. And the woods would actually sparkle un-der the frost. It was truly beautiful.