A good case can be made that writers are the ultimate tourists and sightseers, going through life taking mental snapshots of various points of interest.

Of course, most of those points of interest are not on anybody's tour guide. The International Festival Of Authors, now winding up at Harbourfront, does arrange, however, for outings to one of North America's top tourist destinations - Niagara Falls - for interested writers.

Last Monday, a busload of these authors found themselves in a line-up of tourists waiting to put on yellow plastic raincoats before entering the tunnels in back of the Falls.

"Oh look, we get clothes," said Irish writer Colm Toibin, with delight. "It's like Lourdes. You get a towel there."

Toibin wrote about Lourdes in his recent book, The Sign Of The Cross: Travels In Catholic Europe, written from the point of view of a more or less lapsed Catholic. (Actually, he describes himself as "a flickering Catholic - on and off, on and off.")

Flickering or not, he resorts readily to religious imagery. At one point, he stood at the end of a tunnel which gives tourists a view from behind the waters as they plunge over the edge of the falls. Other tourists were taking a look for a few minutes and then leaving - it's just a lot of mist and water, after all. But Toibin stood mesmerized.

"You're always looking for images of hell, you know, under the Earth, everything always moving," he explained. "Only there, of course, it's fire. And for all eternity."

He watched the agitated swirl of the mist, listened to the ceaseless pounding of the water. After a while, it does resemble something infernal. "It's so chaotic, so violent," Toibin said.

Even Arnon Grunberg, a streetwise and decidedly secular-minded author from the Netherlands, was impressed by the Dante-esque atmosphere of the tunnels. He eyed the other tourists, dressed in yellow, as they drifted through the gray, wet gloom. "It is surrealistic," he pronounced. "This looks like a place you cannot escape."

Emerging from the tunnels, the writers watched the spectacle of the waters from behind the railings on Table Rock. They were fascinated by the lore of Niagara Falls. The first, much publicized, has to do with the Falls as a popular site for honeymoons. The second, not at all publicized, has to do with the Falls as a popular site for committing suicide.

"Yeats said the only things worth talking about were sex and death - and here we are, at the capital of both," Toibin said.
Grunberg took a pragmatic view of the Falls as a suicide spot. "It is better than lying in front of a train," he said. "The driver might get a shock."

As for sex and the Falls, Metka Salamun, wife of Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, decided "It is the male energy."

"Tell me, what is male energy?" Toibin asked.

His travelling companion, a Dublin woman with a slightly ascetic air, didn't miss a beat. "It's powerful, violent, chaotic. Uncontrollable."

At the end of the tour, everyone had enjoyed the Falls. "It was overwhelming," Toibin said. "It beats everything, really. You'd have to be mad to miss it."