WHEN Cabot, in the Mathew, of Bristol, was sailing by the New England coast, and the amazed savage beheld a pyramid of white sails rising, like a cloud, out of the sea, the navigator saw from the deck of his ship, rising out of the land, a cluster of lofty summits cut like a cameo on the northern sky.
The Indian left his tradition of the marvellous apparition, which he at first believed to be a mass of trees wrapped in faded foliage, drifting slowly at the caprice of the waves; but, as he gazed, fire streamed from the strange object, a cloud shut it from his view, and a peal like distant thunder was wafted on the breeze to his startled ears. That peal announced the doom of his race. He was looking at the first ship.
Succeeding navigators, Italians, Portuguese, French, English—a roll of famous names—sailed these seas, and, in their turn, hailed the distant summits. They became the great distinguishing landmarks of this corner of the New World. They are found on all the maps traced by the early geographers from the relations of the discoverers themselves. Having thus found form and substance, they also found a name—the Mountains of St. John.
Ships multiplied. Men of strange garb, speech, complexion, erected their habitations along the coast, the unresisting Indian never dreaming that the thin line which the sea had cast up would speedily rise to an inundation destined to sweep him from the face of the earth. Then began that steady advance, slow at first, gathering momentum with the years, before which he recoiled step by step, and finally disappeared forever. His destiny was accomplished. To-day only mountains and streams transmit to us the certainty that he ever did exist. They are his monument, his lament, his eternal accusation.
The White Mountains stood for the Indian not only as an image, but as the actual dwelling-place of Omnipotence. His dreaded Manitou, whose voice was the thunder, whose anger the lightning, and on whose face no mortal could look and live, was the counterpart of the terrible Thor, the Icelandic god, throned in a palace of ice among frozen and inaccessible mountain peaks, over which he could be heard urging his loud chariot amid the rage of the tempest. Frost and fire, plague and famine were the terrific natural agents common to the Indian and to the Norse mythology; and to his god of terrors the Indian conjurer addressed his prayers, his incantations, and his propitiatory offerings, when some calamity had befallen or threatened his tribe. But to cross the boundary which separated him from the abiding-place of the Manitou! plant his audacious foot within the region from which Nature shrunk back affrighted! Not all the wealth he believed the mountain hoarded would have tempted him to brave the swift and terrible vengeance of the justly offended, all-powerful Manitou. So far, then, as he was concerned, the mountain remained inviolate, inviolable, as a kind of hell, filled with the despairing shrieks of those who in an evil hour transgressed the limits sacred to immortals.[11]
As a pendant to this superstition, in which their deity is with simple grandeur throned on the highest mountain peak, it is curious to remember the Indian tradition of the Deluge; for, like so many peoples, they had their tradition, coming from a remote time, and having strong family resemblance with that of more enlightened nations. According to it, all the inhabitants of the earth were drowned, except one Powaw and his wife, who were preserved by climbing to the top of the White Mountains, and who were the progenitors of the subsequent races of man. The Powaw took with him a hare, which, upon the subsiding of the waters, he freed, as Noah did the dove, seeing in its prolonged absence the assurance that he and his companion might safely descend to earth. The likeness of this tradition with the story of Deucalion, and Pyrrha, his wife, as related by Ovid, is very striking. One does not easily consent to refer it to accident alone.
There is one thing more. When asked by the whites to point out the Indian’s heaven, the savage stretched his arm in the direction of the White Hills, and replied that heaven was just beyond. Such being his religion, and such the influence of the mountain upon this highly imaginative, poetic, natural man, one finds himself drawn legitimately in the train of those marvels which our ancestors considered the most credible things in the world, and which the sceptical cannot explain by a sneer.
According to the Indians, on the highest mountain, suspended from a crag overlooking a dismal lake, was an enormous carbuncle, which many declared they had seen blazing in the night like a live coal. Some even asserted that its ruddy glare lighted the livid rocks around like the fire of a midnight encampment, while by day it emitted rays, like the sun, dazzling to look upon. And this extraordinary sight they declared they had not only seen, but seen again and again.
It is true that the Indians did not hesitate to declare that no mortal hand could hope to grasp the great fire-stone. It was, said they, in the special guardianship of the genius of the mountain, who, on the approach of human footsteps, troubled the waters of the lake, causing a dark mist to rise, in which the venturesome mortal became bewildered, and then hopelessly lost. Several noted conjurers of the Pigwackets, rendered foolhardy by their success in exorcising evil spirits, so far conquered their fears as to ascend the mountain; but they never returned, and had, no doubt, expiated their folly by being transformed into stone, or flung headlong down some stark and terrible precipice.
This tale of the great carbuncle fired the imagination of the simple settlers to the highest pitch. We believe what we wish to believe, and, notwithstanding their religion refused to admit the existence of the Indian demon, its guardian, they seem to have had little difficulty in crediting the reality of the jewel itself. At any rate, the belief that the mountain shut up precious mines has come down to our own day; we are assured by a learned historian of fifty years ago that the story of the great carbuncle still found full credence in his.[12] We are now acquainted with the spirit of the time when the first attempt to scale the mountain, known to us, was rewarded with complete success. But the record is of exasperating brevity.
Among the earliest settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, was a man by the name of Darby Field. The antecedents of this obscure personage are securely hidden behind the mists of more than two centuries.
A hundred and twenty-five years before the ascent of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat, Darby Field successfully ascended to the summit of the “White Hill,” to-day known as Mount Washington; but the exploit of the adventurous Irishman is far more remarkable in its way than that of the brave Swiss, since he had to make his way for eighty miles through a wilderness inhabited only by beasts of prey, or by human beings scarcely less savage, before he reached the foot of the great range; while Balmat lived under the very shadow of the monarch of the Alps, so that its spectre was forever crossing his path. Furthermore, the greater part of the ascent of Mont Blanc was already familiar ground to the guides and chamois-hunters of the Swiss Alps. On the contrary, according to every probability, Field was the first human being whose daring foot invaded the hitherto inviolable seclusion of the illustrious hermit of New England.
For such an adventure one instinctively seeks a motive. I did not long amuse myself with the idea that this explorer climbed merely for the sake of climbing; and I have little notion that he dreamed of posthumous renown. It is far more probable that the reports brought by the Indians of the fabulous treasures of the mountains led to Field’s long, arduous, and really perilous journey. It is certain that he was possessed of rare intrepidity, as well as the true craving for adventure. That goes without saying; still, the whole undertaking—its inception, its pursuit to the end in the face of extraordinary obstacles, which he had no means of measuring or anticipating—announces a very different sort of man from the ordinary, a purpose before which all dangers disappear.
In June, 1642, that is to say, only twelve years after the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts Bay, Field set out from the sea-coast for the White Hills.
So far as known, he prosecuted his journey to the Indian village of Pigwacket, the existence of which is thus established, without noteworthy accident or adventure. Here he was joined by some Indians, who conducted him within eight miles of the summit, when, declaring that to go farther would expose them to the wrath of their great Evil Spirit, they halted, and refused to proceed. The brave Irishman was equal to the emergency. To turn back, baffled, within sight of his goal was evidently not an admitted contingency. Leaving the Indians, therefore, squatted upon the rocks, and no doubt regarding him as a man rushing upon a fool’s fate, Field again resolutely faced the mountain, when, seeing him equally unmoved by their warnings as unshaken in his determination to reach the summit, two of the boldest warriors ran after him, while the others stoically made their preparations to await a return which they never expected to take place. They watched the retreating figures until lost among the rocks.
In the language of the original narration, the rest of the ascent was effected by “a ridge between two valleys filled with snow, out of which came two branches of the Saco River, which met at the foot of the hill, where was an Indian town of two hundred people.” ... “By-the-way, among the rocks, there were two ponds, one a blackish water, and the other reddish.”.... “Within twelve miles of the top was neither tree nor grass, but low savins, which they went upon the top of sometimes.”
The adventurous climber pushed on. Soon he was assailed by thick clouds, through which he and his companions resolutely toiled upward. This slow and labored progress through entangling mists continued until within four miles of the summit, when Field emerged above them into a region of intense cold. Surmounting the immense pile of shattered rocks which constitute the spire, he at last stood upon the unclouded summit, with its vast landscape outspread beneath him, and the air so clear that the sea seemed not more than twenty miles distant. No doubt the daring explorer experienced all the triumph natural to his successful achievement. It is not difficult to imagine the exultation with which he planted his audacious foot upon the topmost crag, for, like Columbus, Cabot, Balboa, he, too, was a real discoverer. The Indians must have regarded him, who thus scornfully braved the vengeance of their god of terrors, as something more than man. I have often pictured him standing there, proudly erect, while the wonder-struck savages crouched humbly at his feet. Both, in their way, felt the presence of their God; but the white man would confront his as an equal, while the savage adored with his face in the dust.
The three men, after their first emotion of ecstasy, amazement, or fear, looked about them. For the moment the great carbuncle was forgotten. Field had chosen the best month of the twelve for his attempt, and now saw a vast and unknown region stretching away on the north and east to the shores of what he took for seas, but what were really only seas of vapor, heaped against the farthest horizons. He fancied he saw a great water to the north, which he judged to be a hundred miles broad, for no land was beyond it. He thought he descried the great Gulf of Canada to the east, and in the west the great lake out of which the river of Canada came. All these illusions are sufficiently familiar to mountain explorers; and it must not be forgotten that in Field’s day geographical knowledge of the interior of the country was indeed limited. In fact, he must have brought back with him the first accurate knowledge respecting the sources of those rivers flowing from the eastern slopes of the mountains. The great gulf on the north side of Mount Washington is truly declared to be such a precipice that they could scarce discern to the bottom; the great northern wilderness as “daunting terrible,” and clothed with “infinite thick woods.” Such is its aspect to-day.
The day must have been so far spent that Field had but little time in which to prosecute his search. He, however, found “store of Muscovy glass” and some crystals, which, supposing them to be diamonds, he carefully secured and brought away. These glittering masses, congealed, according to popular belief, like ice on the frozen regions of the mountains, gave them the name of the Crystal Hills—a name the most poetic, the most suggestive, and the most fitting that has been applied to the highest summits since the day they were first discovered by Englishmen.
Descending the mountain, Field rejoined his Indians, who were doubtless much astonished to see him return to them safe and sound; for, while he had been making the ascent, a furious tempest, sent, as these savages believed, to destroy the rash pale-face and his equally reckless companions, burst upon the mountain. He found them drying themselves by a fire of pine-knots; and, after a short halt, the party took their way down the mountain to the Indian village.
Before a month elapsed, Field, with five or six companions, made a second ascent; but the gem of inestimable value, by whose light one might read at night, continued to elude his pursuit. The search was not, however, abandoned. Others continued it. The marvellous story, as firmly believed as ever by the credulous, survived, in all its purity, to our own century, to be finally transmitted to immortality by Hawthorne’s tale of “The Great Carbuncle.” It may be said here that great influence was formerly attributed to this stone, which the learned in alchemy believed prevailed against the dangers of infection, and was a sure talisman to preserve its owner from peril by sea or by land.
A tradition is ten times a tradition when it has a fixed locality. Without this it is a myth, a mere vagabond of a tradition. Knowing this, I searched diligently for the spot where the great carbuncle, like the eye of a Cyclop, shed its red lustre far down the valley of the Saco; and if the little mountain tarn to-day known as Hermit Lake, over which the gaunt crags rise in austere grandeur, be not the place, then I am persuaded that further seeking would be unavailing. I cannot go so far as to say that it never existed.
What seems passing strange is that the feat performed by Field,[13] the fame of which spread throughout the colony, should have been nearly, if not wholly, forgotten before the lapse of a century. Robert Rogers, one of the most celebrated hunters of the White Mountains, subsequently a renowned partisan leader in the French and Indian wars, uses the following language concerning them:
“I cannot learn that any person was ever on the top of these mountains. I have been told by the Indians that they have often attempted it in vain, by reason of the change of air they met with, which I am inclined to believe, having ascended them myself ‘til the alteration of air was very perceptible; and even then I had not advanced half way up; the valleys below were then concealed from view by clouds.”
It is not precisely known when or how these granite peaks took the name of the White Mountains. We find them so designated in 1672 by Josselyn, who himself performed the feat of ascending the highest summit, of which a brief record is found in his “New England’s Rarities.” One cannot help saying of this book that either the author was a liar of the first magnitude, or else we have to regret the degeneracy of Nature, exhausted by her long travail; for this narrator gravely tells us of frogs which were as big as a child of a year old, and of poisonous serpents which the Indians caught with their bare hands, and ate alive with great gusto. These are rarities indeed.
The first mention I have met with of an Indian name for the White Mountains is in the narrative of John Gyles’s captivity, printed in Boston in 1736, saying:
“These White Hills, at the head of Penobscot River, are by the Indians said to be much higher than those called Agiockochook,[14] above Saco.”
The similitude between the names White Mountains and Mont Blanc suggests the same idea, that color, rather than character, makes the first and strongest impression upon the beholder. Thus we have White Mountains and Green Mountains, Red Mountains and Black Mountains, the world over. The eye seizes a color before the mind fixes upon a distinctive feature, or the imagination a resemblance. It is stated, on the authority of Schoolcraft, that the Algonquins called these summits “White Rocks.” Mariners, approaching from the open sea, descried what seemed a cloud-bank, rising from the landward horizon, when twenty leagues from the nearest coast, and before any other land was visible from the mast-head. Thirty leagues distant in a direct line, in a clear midsummer day, the distant summits appeared of a pearly whiteness; observed again from a church steeple on the sea-coast, with the sky partially overcast, they were whitish-gray, showing that the change from blue to white, or to cool tones approximating with white, is due to atmospheric conditions. The early writers succeed only imperfectly in accounting for this phenomenon, which for six months of the year at least has no connection whatever with the snows that cover the highest peaks only from the middle of October to the middle of April, a period during which few navigators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries visited our shores, or, indeed, ventured to put to sea at all.[15]
IT is Petrarch who says, “A journey on foot hath most pleasant commodities; a man may go at his pleasure; none shall stay him, none shall carry him beyond his wish, none shall trouble him; he hath but one labor, the labor of nature, to go.” Every true pedestrian ought to render full faith to the poet’s assertion; and should he chance to have his Laura, he will see her somewhere, or, rather, everywhere, I promise him. But that is his affair.
There are two ways of reaching Jackson from North Conway. One route leaves the travelled highway a short distance beyond the East Branch of the Saco, and ascends Thorn Hill; another diverges from it near Glen Station, in Bartlett. The Thorn Hill way is the longer; but, as the views are unsurpassed, I unhesitatingly chose it in preference to the easier and shorter road.
The walk from the Intervale over Thorn Hill gives ravishing backward glimpses, opening to a full and broad panorama of the Saco meadows and of the surrounding mountains. Needless to call them by name. One might forget names, but the image never. Then, advancing to the summit, full upon the charmed eye comes that glorious vision of the great mountains, elevated to an immense height, and seeming, in their benevolence, to say, “Approach, mortals!” Underneath is the village.
We have left the grand vestibule of the Saco to enter an amphitheatre. Washington, in his snowy toga, occupies the place of high honor. Adams flaunts his dainty spire over the Pinkham Notch, at the monarch’s left hand. Then comes an embattled wall, pierced through its centre by the immense hollow of the Carter Notch.
Jackson is the ideal mountain village. From Thorn Hill it looked a little elysium, with its handful of white houses huddled around its one little church spire, like a congregation sitting at the feet of their pastor. You perceive neither entrance nor exit, so completely is the deep vale shut in by mountains. The streams, that make two veins of silver in the green floor, seem vainly seeking a way out. One would think Nature had locked the door and thrown away the key. The first stream is the Wildcat, coming from the Carter Notch; the second, the Ellis, from the Pinkham Notch. They unite just below the village, and, like a forlorn-hope, together cut their way out of the mountains.
Getting down into the village, the high mountains now sink out of sight, and I saw only the nearer and less elevated ones immediately surrounding—on the north, Eagle and Wildcat; on the east, Tin and Thorn; on the west, Iron Mountain. The latter has fine, bold cliffs. Over its smooth slope I again saw the two great steps of the Giant’s Stairs, mounting the long ridge which conducts to the great plateau of Mount Washington.
The village has a bright, pleasant look, but is not otherwise remarkable in itself. Three hotels, the church, and a score or so of houses, constitute the central portion. But if the village is small, the township is large; and what is the visitor’s astonishment, on opening his eyes some fine morning, to see farms and farm-houses scattered along the very summit of Thorn Mountain, whence they appear to regard the little world below with a lofty disdain. How came they there? is the question one feels inclined to ask; for in this enchanted air he loses the desire, almost the faculty, of thinking for himself. The inhabitants of this little colony seem to prize their seclusion, and only descend to earth at the call of necessity. Their neighbors are the eagles. Surely this is Ultima Thule. Alas! no; the tax-gatherer mounts even here.
The people of Jackson are above all anxious for the development of the mineral resources of the place. They have iron and tin, and claim also the existence of copper and even of gold ores. Yet it is probable that the vein most profitable for them, the one most likely to yield satisfactory returns, is that on which the summer hotels have been located and opened. So far, the mountains refuse to give up the wealth they hoard.
GIANT’S STAIRS, FROM THORN MOUNTAIN. GIANT’S STAIRS, FROM THORN MOUNTAIN.
The Wildcat cuts the village in two. It is a perfect highwayman of a stream. The very air is tremulous with its rush and roar. I halted awhile on the little bridge that spans it, from which, looking down the long pathway it makes, I enjoyed a fine retrospect of the Moats, and, looking up, saw the torrent come bounding toward me. Here it makes a swift descent over granite ledges, clean and fresh from constant scrubbing, as the face of a country urchin, and as freckled. See how hard every rod of its course is beset by huge hump-backed bowlders! A river in fetters!
Just above the bridge the stream plunges, two white streaks of water, twenty to thirty feet obliquely down. Now it is dark, now light; sometimes tinged a pale emerald, sometimes a rich amber, where it falls down in thin sheets. For half a mile the ledges look as if an earthquake had ripped them up to make a channel for this tempest of water. It is from these ledges, looking down the course of the stream, that Moat Mountain is so incomparably fine. It stretches itself luxuriously along the rich meadows, like a Sybarite upon his couch of velvet, lifting its head high enough to embrace the landscape, of which itself is the most attractive feature. And the tall pines rise above the framework of forest, as if to look at the beautiful mountain, clothed with the light of the morning, and reclining with such infinite grace.
Sprays of trembling foliage droop or stretch themselves out over the stream in search of the fine dew it sends up. They seem endeavoring to hide the broad scar made through the forest. The clear sun illuminates their green leaves, and makes the cool rocks emit a sensible warmth. It also illuminates the little fountains of water. Ferns and young willows shoot from crevices, delicate mosses attach themselves to the grim bowlders. I found the perfect print of a human foot sunk in the hardest rock; also cavities as cleverly rounded as if pebbles had been taken from the granite. On the banks, under the thick shade of the pines, I gathered a handful of the showy pappoose flower, the green leaves of which are edible. Little mauve butterflies fluttered at our knees like violets blown about by the wind.
The crest of the fall is split, and broken up in huge fragments. The main stream gains an outlet by a deep channel it has cut in the rock; then turns a mill; then shoots down the face of the ledge. Above the high ledge the bed of the river widens to about two hundred feet. Higher up, where it is broken in long regular steps over which fifty cascades tumble, I thought it most beautiful.
Besides Jackson Falls, so called, there is a fine cataract on the Ellis, known as Goodrich Falls. This is a mile and a half out of the village, where the Conway road passes the Ellis by a bridge; and, being directly upon the high-road, is one of the best known. The river here suddenly pours its whole volume over a precipice eighty feet high, making the earth tremble with the shock. I made my way down the steep bank to the bed of the river below the fall, from which I saw, first, the curling wave, large, regular, and glassy, of the dam, then three wild and foaming pitches of broken water, with detached cascades gushing out from the rocks at the right—all falling heavily into the eddying pool below. Where the water was not white, or filliped into fine spray, it was the color of pale sherry, and opaque, gradually changing to amber gold as the light penetrated it and the descending sheet of the fall grew thinner. The full tide of the river showed the fall to the best possible advantage. But spring is the season of cascades—the only season when one is sure of seeing them at all.
One gets strongly attached to such a stream as the Ellis. If it has been his only comrade for weeks, as it has been mine, the liking grows stronger every day—the sense of companionship is full and complete: the river is so voluble, so vivacious, so full of noisy chatter. If you are dull, it rouses and lifts you out of yourself; if gay, it is as gay as you. Besides, there is the paradox that, notwithstanding you may be going in different directions, it never leaves you for a single moment. One talks as it runs, one listens as he walks. A secret, an indefinable sympathy springs up. You are no longer alone.
MOAT MOUNTAIN, FROM JACKSON FALLS. MOAT MOUNTAIN, FROM JACKSON FALLS.
Among other stories that the river told me was the following:
Once, while on their way to Canada through these mountains, a war-party of Indians, fresh from a successful forray on the sea-coast, halted with their prisoners on the banks of a stream whose waters stopped their way. For weeks these miserable captives had toiled through trackless forests, through swollen and angry torrents, sometimes climbing mountains on their hands and knees—they were so steep—and at night stretching their aching limbs on the cold ground, with no other roof than the heavens.[16]
The captives were a mother, with her new-born babe, scarcely fourteen days old, her boy of six, her two daughters of fourteen and sixteen years, and her maid. Two of her little flock were missing. One little prattler was playing at her knee, and another in the orchard, when thirteen red devils burst in the door of their happy home. Two cruel strokes of the axe stretched them lifeless in their blood before her frenzied eyes. One was killed to intimidate, the other was despatched because he was afraid, and cried out to his mother. There was no time for tears—none even for a parting kiss. Think of that, mothers of the nineteenth century! The tragedy finished, the hapless survivors were hurried from the house into the woods. There was no resistance. The blow fell like a stroke of lightning from a clear sky.
This mother, whose eyes never left the embroidered belt of the chief, where the reeking scalps of her murdered babes hung; this mother, who had tasted the agony of death from hour to hour, and whose incomparable courage not only supported her own weak frame, but had so far miraculously preserved the lives of her little ones, now stood shivering on the shores of the swollen torrent with her babe in her arms, and holding her little boy by the hand. In rags, bleeding, and almost famished, her misery should have melted a heart of stone. But she well knew the mercy of her masters. When fainting, they had goaded her on with blows, or, making a gesture as if to snatch her little one from her arms, significantly grasped their tomahawks. Hope was gone; but the mother’s instinct was not yet extinguished in that heroic breast.
But at this moment of sorrow and despair, what was her amazement to hear the Indians accost her daughter Sarah, and command her to sing them a song. What mysterious chord had the wild, flowing river touched in those savage breasts? The girl prepared to obey, and the Indians to listen. In the heart of these vast solitudes, which never before echoed to a human voice, the heroic English maiden chanted to the plaintive refrain of the river the sublime words of the Psalmist:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
“We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
“For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth.”
As she sung, the poor girl’s voice trembled and her eyes filled, but she never once looked toward her mother.
When the last notes of the singer’s voice died away, the bloodiest devil, he who murdered the children, took the babe gently from the mother, without a word; another lifted her burden to his own shoulder; another, the little boy; when the whole company entered the river.
Gentlemen, metaphysicians, explain that scene, if you please: it is no romance.
As this tale plunged me in a train of sombre reflection, the river recounted one of those marvellous legends which contain more poetry than superstition, and which here seem so appropriate.
According to the legend, a family living at the foot of a lofty peak had a daughter more beautiful than any maiden of the tribe, possessing a mind elevated far above the common order, and as accomplished as beautiful. When she reached a proper age, her parents looked around them for a suitable match, but in vain. None of the young men of the tribe were worthy of so peerless a creature. Suddenly this lovely wildflower of the mountains disappeared. Diligent was the search, and loud the lamentations when no trace of her light moccasin could be found in forest or glade. The tribe mourned her as lost. But one day some hunters, who had penetrated into the fastnesses of the mountain, discovered the lost maiden disporting herself in the limpid waters of a stream with a beautiful youth, whose hair, like her own, flowed down below his waist. On the approach of the intruders, the youthful bathers vanished from sight. The relatives of the maiden recognized her companion as one of the kind spirits of the mountain, and henceforth looked upon him as their son. They called upon him for moose, bear, or whatever creature they desired, and had only to go to the water-side and signify their desire, when, behold! the animal came swimming toward them. This legend strongly reminded me of one of those marvellous fables of the Hartz, in which a princess of exceeding beauty, destroyed by the arts of a wicked fairy, was often seen bathing in the river Ilse. If she met a traveller, she conducted him into the interior of the mountain and loaded him with riches. Each legend dimly conveys its idea of the wealth believed to reside in the mountain itself.
The Ellis continues to guide us farther and farther into the mountains. If we turn in the direction of the Glen House, a mile out of the village the Giant’s Stairs come finely into view, and are held for some distance. Then bewitching vistas of Mount Washington, with snow decorating his huge sides, rise and sink, appear and disappear, until we reach an open vale, where the stream is spanned by a rude bridge. The route offers nothing more striking in its way than the view of the Pinkham Notch, which lies open at this point.
One of my walks extending as far as the last house on this road, permitted me to gratify a strong desire to see something of the in-door life of the poorer class of farmers. That desire was fully satisfied. There was nothing remarkable about the house itself; but the room in which I rested would have furnished Meyer von Bremen a capital subject for one of his characteristic interiors—it carried me back a century at least. In one corner a woman upward of seventy, I should say, sat at a spinning-wheel. She rose, got my bread-and-milk, and then resumed her spinning. A young mother, with a babe in her lap and two tow-headed urchins at her knee, occupied a high-backed rocking-chair. To judge from appearances, the river which flowed by the door was completely forgotten. Her efforts to hush the babe being interrupted by the peevish whining of one of the brats, she dealt him a sound box on the ear, upon which the whole pack howled in unison, while the mother, very red with the effect of her own anger, dragged the culprit from the room. There was still another occupant, a young girl, so silently plying her needle that I did not at first notice her. The floor was bare. A rickety chair or two and a cradle finished the meagre inventory of the apartment. The general appearance of things was untidy and unthrifty, rather than squalid; but I could not help recalling Sir William Davenant’s remark, “that those tenants never get much furniture who begin with a cradle.”
In such rambles, romantic and picturesque, in such dreams, the time runs away. The weeks are long days, the days moments. Every one asks himself why he finds Jackson so enticing, but no one is able to answer the question. Cui bono? When I am happy, shall I make myself miserable searching for the reason? Not if I know it.
Like bees to the sweetest flowers, the artists alight on the choicest bits of scenery by instinct. One runs across their umbrellas almost everywhere, spread like gigantic mushrooms; but some of them seem only to live and have their true artistic being here. In general, they are gentle, unobtrusive, and rather subdued in the presence of their beloved mountains. Some among them, however, develop actual rapacity in the search for new subjects, as, with a pencil between their teeth, they creep in ambush to surprise and carry off some mountain beauty which you or I are to ransom. Does a traveller contemplate some arduous exploration in an unvisited region? the artist knocks him over by quietly remarking, “I camped there several days last year.”
In France they maintain that high mountains cannot be painted. Consequently, the modern French landscape is almost always a dead level; an illimitable plain, through which a placid stream quietly meanders, with a thick wood of aged trees at the left, a snug hamlet in the middle distance, some shrubbery on the right, and a clumsy ox-cart with peasants, in the foreground. All these details are sufficiently commonplace; but they appeal strongly to our human yearning for a life of perfect peace—a sanctuary the world cannot enter. Turner knew that he must paint a mountain with its head in the clouds, and its feet plunged in unfathomable abysses. Imagination would do the rest, and imagination governs the universe.
Photography cannot reproduce the true relation of distant mountains to the landscape. The highest summits look like hills. For want of color, too, it is always twilight. Even running water has a frozen look, and rocks emit a dead, sepulchral glare. But for details—every leaf of the tree, or shadow of the leaf—it is faultless; it is the thing itself. True, under the magnifying-glass the foliage looks crisped, as is noticed after a first frost. In short, the photograph of mountain scenery is like that of a friend taken in his coffin. We say with a shiver that is he, but, alas, how changed! A body without a soul. Again, photography cannot suggest movement. Perfect immobility is a condition indispensable to a successful picture. A successful picture! A petrified landscape!
“In the morning to the mountain,” says the proverb, as emblematic of high hopes. For two stations embodying the best features the vicinity of Jackson can offer, the crest of Thorn Mountain and the ledges above Fernald’s Farm are strongly commended to every sojourner. Both are easily reached. On the first, you are a child lifted above the crowd on the shoulders of a giant; the mountains have come to you. On the second, you have taken the best possible position to study the form and structure of Mount Washington. You see all the ravines, and can count all the gigantic feelers the immense mountain throws down into the gorge of the Ellis. In this way, step by step, we continue to master the topography of the region visited as we take our chocolate, one sip at a time.
I prepared to continue my journey to the Glen House by the valley of the Wildcat and the Carter Notch, which is a sort of side entrance to the Peabody Valley. Two passes thus lie on alternate sides of the same mountain chain. Before doing so, however, two words are necessary.
WHAT traveller can pass beyond the crest of Thorn Hill without paying his tribute of silent admiration to the splendid pageant of mountains visible from this charmed spot! Before him the great rampart, bristling with its countless towers, is breached as cleanly as if a cannon-ball had just crashed through it. It is an immense hole; it is the cavity from which, apparently, one of those great iron teeth has just been extracted. Only it does not disfigure the landscape. Far from it. It really exalts the surrounding peaks. They are enormously aggrandized by it. You look around for a mountain of proper size and shape to fill it. That gives the true idea. It is a mountainous hole.
The little river, tumbling step by step down its broken ledges into Jackson, comes direct from the Notch, and its stream is the thread which conducts through the labyrinth of thick woods. I dearly love the companionship of these mountain streams. They are the voices of the wilderness, singing high or low, softly humming a melodious refrain to your thoughts, or, joining innumerable cascades in one grand chorus, they salute the ear with a gush of sound that strips the forest of its loneliness and awe. This same madcap Wildcat runs shouting and hallooing through the woods like a stream possessed.
By half-past seven of a bright and crisp morning I was climbing the steep hill-side over which Jackson Falls pour down. Here was a genuine surprise. On arriving at the top, instead of entering a difficult and confined gorge, I found a charming and tolerably wide vale, dotted with farms, extending far up into the midst of the mountains. You hardly realize that the stream flowing so demurely along the bottom of the valley is the same making its entry into the village with such noise and tumult. Half a mile above the falls the snowy cupola of Washington showed itself over Eagle Mountain for a few moments. Then, farther on, Adams was seen, also white with snow. For five miles the road skirts the western slopes of the valley, which grows continually deeper, narrower, and higher. Spruce Mountain is now on our left, the broad flanks of Black Mountain occupy the right side of the valley. Beyond Black Mountain Carter Dome lifts its ponderous mass, and between them the dip of the Perkins Notch, dividing the two ranges, gives admittance to the Wild River Valley, and to the Androscoggin, in Shelburne. Before me the grand, downward curves of Carter Notch opened wider and wider.
I picked up, en route, the guide of this locality, who lives on the side of the mountain near where the road is left for the woods. Our business was transacted in two words. While he was strapping on his knapsack I had leisure to observe the manner of man he was.
The guide, whose Christian name is Jonathan, is known in all the country round as “Jock” Davis. He was a medium-sized, muscular man, whiskered to his eyes, with a pair of bare arms the color of unglazed earthen-ware, and a step like a panther. As he strode silently on before, with his dog at his heels, I was reminded of the Jibenainosay and his inseparable Little Peter. He was steady as a clock, careful, and a capital forester, but a trifle taciturn. From time to time, as he drew my attention to the things noticeable or interesting by the way, his face grew animated, and his eyes sparkled. By the same token I believed I detected that dormant perception of beauty and grandeur which is inborn, and which travellers are in general too much disposed to deny any existence among the natives of these mountains. It is true, one cannot express his feelings with the vivacity of the other; but if there is such a thing as speech in silence, the honest guide’s looks spoke volumes.
He told me that he was accustomed to get his own living in the woods, like an old bear. He had trapped and gummed all through the region we were in; the slopes of the great range, and the Wild River wilderness, which he declared, with a shake of the head, to be “a horrid hole.” Now and then, without halting, he took a step to the right or left to look into his fox and sable traps, set near the foot-path. When he spoke of “gumming” on Wildcat Mountain, I was near making an awkward mistake; I understood him to say “gunning.” So I very innocently asked what he had bagged. He opened his eyes widely and replied, “Gum.”[17]
THE CARTER NOTCH.
THE CARTER NOTCH.
Seeing me ready, Davis whistled to his dog, and we entered the logging-road in Indian file. We at once took a brisk pace, which in a short time brought us to the edge of a clearing, now badly overgrown with bramble and coppice, and showing how easily nature obliterates the mark of civilization when left alone. In this clearing an old cellar told its sad story but too plainly. Those pioneers who first struck the axe into the noble pines here are all gone. They abandoned in consternation the effort to wring a scanty subsistence from this inhospitable and unfruitful region. Even the poor farms I had seen encroaching upon the skirts of this wilderness seemed fighting in retreat.
We quickly came to a second opening, where the axe of God had smote the forest still more ruthlessly than that of man. The ground was encumbered with half-burnt trees, among which the gaudy fire-weed grew rank and tall. Divining my thought, the guide explained in his quaint, sententious way, “Fire went through it; then the wind harricaned it down.” A comprehensive sweep of his staff indicated the area traversed by the whirlwind of fire and the tornado. This opening disclosed at our left the gray cliffs and yawning aperture of the Notch—by far the most satisfactory view yet obtained, and the nearest.
Burying ourselves in deeper solitudes, broken only by the hound in full cry after a fox or a rabbit, we descended to the banks of the Wildcat at a point one and a half miles from the road we had left. We then crossed the rude bridge of logs, keeping company with the gradually diminishing river, now upon one bank, now on the other, making a gradual ascent along with it, frequently pausing in mid-stream to glance up and down through the beautiful vistas it has cut through the trees. Halt at the third crossing, traveller, and take in the long course through the avenue of black, moss-draped firs! one so sombre and austere, the other gliding so bright and blithesome out of its shadow and gloom. Just above this spot a succession of tiny water-falls comes like a procession of nymphs out of an enchanted wood.
We were now in a colder region. The sparseness of the timber led me to look right and left for the stumps of felled trees, but I saw nothing of the kind. To the rigorous climate and extreme leanness of the soil they attribute the scanty, undersized growth. I did not see fifty good timber trees along the whole route. Where a large tree had been prostrated by the wind, its upturned and matted roots showed a pitiful quantity of earth adhering. Finding it impossible to grow downward more than a few poor inches, they spread themselves laterally out to a great distance. But the fir, with its flame-shaped point, is a symbol of indomitable pluck. You see it standing erect on the top of some huge bowlder, which its strong, thick roots clutch like a vulture’s talons. How came it there? Look at those rotting trunks, so beautifully covered with the lycopodium and partridge-plum! The seed of a fir has taken root in the bark. A tiny tree is already springing from the rich mould. As it grows, its roots grasp whatever offers a support; and if the decaying tree has fallen across a bowlder, they strike downward into the soil beneath it, and the rock is a prisoner during the lifetime of the tree. Its resin protects it from the icy blasts of winter, and from the alternate freezing and thawing of early spring. It is emphatically the tree of the mountains.
An hour and a half of pretty rapid walking brought us to the bottom of a steep rise. We were at length come to close quarters with the formidable outworks of Wildcat Mountain. The brook has for some distance poured a stream of the purest water over moss of the richest green, but now it most mysteriously vanishes from sight. From this point the singular rock called the Pulpit is seen overhanging the upper crags of the Dome.[18]
We drank a cup of delicious water from a spring by the side of the path, and, finding direct access forbidden by the towering and misshapen mass before us, turned sharply to the left, and attacked the side of Wildcat Mountain. We had now attained an altitude of nearly three thousand feet above the sea, or two thousand two hundred and fifty above the village of Jackson; we were more than a thousand higher than the renowned Crawford Notch.
On every side the ground was loaded down with huge gray bowlders, so ponderous that it seemed as if the solid earth must give way under them. Some looked as if the merest touch would send them crashing down the mountain. Undermined by the slow action of time, these fragments have fallen one by one from the high cliffs, and accumulated at the base. Among these the path serpentined for half a mile more, bringing us at last to the summit of the spur we had been climbing, and to the broad entrance of the Notch. We passed quickly over the level ground we were upon, stopped by the side of a well-built cabin of bark, threw off our loads, and then, fascinated by the exceeding strangeness of everything around me, I advanced to the edge of the scrubby growth in front of the camp, in order to command an unobstructed view.
Shall I live long enough to forget this sublime tragedy of nature, enacted Heaven knows when or how? How still it was! I seemed to have arrived at the instant a death-like silence succeeds the catastrophe. I saw only the bare walls of a temple, of which some Samson had just overthrown the columns—walls overgrown with a forest, ruins overspread with one struggling for existence.
Imagine the light of a mid-day sun brightening the tops of the mountains, while within a sepulchral gloom rendered all objects—rocks, trees, cliffs—all the more weird and fantastic. I was between two high mountains, whose walls enclose the pass. Overhanging it, fifteen hundred feet at least, the sunburnt crags of the Dome towered above the highest precipices of the mountain behind me. These stately barriers, at once so noble and imposing, seemed absolutely indestructible. Impossible to conceive anything more enduring than this imperishable rock. So long as the world stands, those mountains will stand. And nothing can shake this conviction. They look so strong, so confident in their strength, so incapable of change.
But what, then, is this dusky gray mass, stretching huge and irregular across the chasm from mountain to mountain, completely filling the space between, and so effectually blockading the entrance that we were compelled to pick our way up the steep side of the mountain in order to turn it?
Picture to yourself acres upon acres of naked granite, split and splintered in every conceivable form, of enormous size and weight, yet pitched, piled, and tumbled about like playthings, tilted, or so poised and balanced as to open numberless caves, which sprinkled the whole area with a thousand shadows—figure this, I repeat, to yourself—and the mind will then grasp but faintly the idea of this colossal barricade, seemingly built by the giants of old to guard their last stronghold from all intrusion. At some distance in front of me a rock of prodigious size, very closely resembling the gable of a house, thrusting itself half out, conveyed its horrible suggestion of an avalanche in the act of ingulfing a hamlet. And all this one beholds in a kind of stupefaction.
Whence came this colossal débris? I had at first the idea that the great arch, springing from peak to peak, supported on the Atlantean shoulders of the two mountains, had fallen in ruins. I even tried to imagine the terrific crash with which heaven and earth came together in the fall. Easy to realize here Schiller’s graphic description of the Jungfrau:
“One walks there between life and death. Two threatening peaks shut in the solitary way. Pass over this place of terror without noise; dread lest you awaken the sleeping avalanche.”
It is evident, however, as soon as the eye attaches itself to the side of the Dome, that one of its loftiest precipices, originally measuring an altitude as great as any yet remaining, has precipitated itself in a crushed and broken mass into the abyss. Nothing is left of the primitive edifice except these ruins. It is easily conceived that, previous to the convulsion, the interior aspect of the Notch was quite different from what is seen to-day. It was doubtless narrower, gloomier, and deeper before the cliff became dislodged. The track of the convulsion is easily traced. From top to bottom the side of the mountain is hollowed out, exposing a shallow ravine, in which nothing but dwarf spruces will grow, and in which the erratic rocks, arrested here and there in their fall, seem endeavoring to regain their ancient position on the summit. There is no trace whatever of the rubbish ordinarily accompanying a slide—only these rocks.
Seeing that all this happened long ago, I asked the guide why the larger growth we saw on both sides of the hollow had not succeeded in covering the old scar, as is the case with the Willey Slide; but he was unable to advance even a conjecture. The spruce, however, loves ruins, spreading itself out over them with avidity.
We felt our way cautiously and slowly out over the bowlders; for the moment one quits the usual track he risks falling headlong upon the sharp rocks beneath. In the midst of these grisly blocks stunted firs are born, and die for want of sustenance, making the dreary waste bristle with hard and horny skeletons. The spruce, dwarfed and deformed, has established itself solidly in the interstices; a few bushes spring up in the crannies. With this exception, the entire area is denuded of vegetation. The obstruction is heaped in two principal ridges, traversing its greatest breadth, and opening a broad way between. This is one of the most curious features I remarked. From a flat rock on the summit of the first we obtained the best idea of the general configuration of the Notch; and from this point, also, we saw the two little lakes beneath us which are the sources of the Wildcat. Beyond, and above the hollow they occupy, the two mountains meet in the low ridge constituting the true summit of Carter Notch. Far down, under the bowlders, the Wildcat gropes its way out; but, notwithstanding one or the other was continually dropping out of sight into the caverns with which they are filled, we could neither hear nor see anything to indicate its route. It is buried out of sight and sound.
No incident of the whole excursion is more curiously inexplicable than the total disappearance of the brook at the mountain’s foot. Notice that it was last seen gushing from the side we ascended, half a mile below the camp. Whence does it come? When we were on top of the bowlders, looking down on the water of the two little lakes, we wonderingly ask, “Where does it go? How does it get out?” The mystery is, however, solved by the certainty that their waters flow out underneath the barrier, so that this mammoth pile of débris, which could destroy a city, was unable to arrest the flow of a rivulet.
But all this wreck and ruin exerts a saddening influence; it seems to prefigure the Death of the Mountain. So one gladly turns to the landscape—a very noble though not extensive one—enclosing all the mountains and valleys to the south of us lying between Kearsarge and Moat.
After this tour of the rocks, we returned to the hut and ate our luncheon. Here the Pulpit Rock, which is sure to catch the eye whenever it wanders to the cliffs opposite, looks very much like the broken handle of a jug. Davis explained that, by advancing fifteen or twenty paces upon it, it would be possible to hang suspended over the thousand feet of space beneath. While thus occupied, the dog received his share of the bread and meat; nor was the little tame hawk that came and hopped so fearlessly at our feet forgotten. This bird and a cross-bill were the only living things I saw.[19]
Being fully rested and refreshed, we started on a second exploration of the upper part of the Notch. Thus far our examination had been confined to the lower portion only. Descending the spur upon which the hut is situated, we were, in a few moments, at the bottom of the deep cavity lying between the Giants’ Barricade and the little mountain forming the northern portal. This area is undoubtedly the original floor of the pass. We had now reached a position between the lakes. Looking backward, the barricade lifted a black and frowning wall a hundred and fifty feet above our heads. Looking down, the water of the lakes seemed “an image of the Dead Sea sleeping at the foot of Jerusalem destroyed.” While I stood looking into them, a passing cloud, pausing in astonishment at seeing itself reflected from these shadowy depths, darkened the whole interior. Deprived all at once of sunlight, the scene became one of great and magnificent solemnity. The pass assumed the appearance of a vast cavern. The ponds lay still and cold below. The air grew chill, the water black as ink. The ruddy color faded from the cliffs. They became livid. I saw the thousands upon thousands of fir-trees, rigid and sombre, ranged tier on tier like spectators in an immense circus, who are awaiting the signal for some terrible spectacle to begin. When the cloud tranquilly resumed its journey, a load seemed lifted off. It was Nature repeating to herself,