would you believe that even these terrible creatures have to be guarded by the troopers to prevent the irreverent americans from chipping the cones to pieces,or,worse still,making the geyser sick?if you take a small barrel full of soft-soap and drop it down a geyser's mouth,that geyser will presently be forced to lay all before you,and for days afterward will be of an irritated and inconstant stomach.
when they told me the tale i was filled with sympathy.now iwish that i had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely little beast far away in the woods.it sounds so probable and so human.
yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the giantess.she is flat-lipped,having no mouth;she looks like a pool,fifty feet long and thirty wide,and there is no ornamentation about her.at irregular intervals she speaks and sends up a volume of water over two hundred feet high to begin with,then she is angry for a day and a half--sometimes for two days.
owing to her peculiarity of going mad in the night,not many people have seen the giantess at her finest;but the clamor of her unrest,men say,shakes the wooden hotel,and echoes like thunder among the hills.
the congregation returned to the hotel to put down their impressions in diaries and note-books,which they wrote up ostentatiously in the verandas.it was a sweltering hot day,albeit we stood some-what higher than the level of simla,and ileft that raw pine creaking caravansary for the cool shade of a clump of pines between whose trunks glimmered tents.
a batch of united states troopers came down the road and flung themselves across the country into their rough lines.the melican cavalryman can ride,though he keeps his accoutrements pig-fashion and his horse cow-fashion.
i was free of that camp in five minutes--free to play with the heavy,lumpy carbines,have the saddles stripped,and punch the horses knowingly in the ribs.one of the men had been in the fight with "wrap-up-his-tail,"and he told me how that great chief,his horse's tail tied up in red calico,swaggered in front of the united states cavalry,challenging all to single combat.