The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery
TekstWe are still advancing in this region of wonders. In our front soars an insuperable mass of forest-shagged rock. Behind it rises the absolutely regal Lafayette. Our footsteps are stayed by the glimmer of water through trees by the road-side. We have reached the summit of the pass.
Six miles of continued ascent from the Flume House have brought us to Profile Lake, which the road skirts. Although a pretty enough piece of water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by its thousands, or for being the source of the Pemigewasset, or for its trout – which you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface – but for the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit! It is difficult to believe the evidence of the senses! Upon the high cliffs of this mountain is the remarkable and celebrated natural rock sculpture of a human head, which, from a height twelve hundred feet above the lake, has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass upon the windings of the river through its incomparable valley. The profile itself measures about forty feet from the tip of the chin to the flattened crown which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique appearance. All is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by something like the visor of a helmet. And all this illusion is produced by several projecting crags. It might be said to have been begotten by a thunder-bolt.
Taking a seat within a rustic arbor on the high shore of the lake, one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A change of position varies more or less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked peculiarity of this monstrous alto relievo; for let the spectator turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand – as he inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some strange hallucination – a fascination born neither of admiration nor horror, but strongly partaking of both emotions, draws him irresistibly back to the Dantesque head stuck, like a felon’s, on the highest battlements of the pass. The more you may have seen, the more your feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face, it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a cast from a living head. You feel and will always maintain that those features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more, nothing less.
But where and what was the original prototype? Not man; since, ages before he was created, the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture upon the rock above us. No, not man; the face is too majestic, too nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of the antique gods may, perhaps, have sat for this archetype of the coming man. And yet not man, we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth.
This gigantic silhouette, which has been dubbed the Old Man of the Mountain, is unquestionably the greatest curiosity of this or any other mountain region. It is unique. But it is not merely curious; nor is it more marvellous for the wonderful accuracy of outline than for the almost superhuman expression of frozen terror it eternally fixes on the vague and shadowy distance – a far-away look; an intense and speechless amazement, such as sometimes settles on the faces of the dying at the moment the soul leaves the body forever – untranslatable into words, but seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision, too bright and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. The face puts the whole world behind it. It does everything but speak – nay, you are ready to swear that it is going to speak! And so this chance jumbling together of a few stones has produced a sculpture before which Art hangs her head.
I renounce in dismay the idea of reproducing the effect on the reader’s mind which this prodigy produced on my own. Impressions more pronounced, yet at the same time more inexplicable, have never so effectually overcome that habitual self-command derived from many experiences of travel among strange and unaccustomed scenes. From the moment the startled eye catches it one is aware of a Presence which dominates the spirit, first with strange fear, then by that natural revulsion which at such moments makes the imagination supreme, conducts straight to the supernatural, there to leave it helplessly struggling in a maze of impotent conjecture. But, even upon this debatable ground, between two worlds, one is not able to surprise the secret of those lips of marble. The Sphinx overcomes us by his stony, his disdainful silence. Let the visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a first sight of this weird object forces upon him. He is, indeed, less than human if the feeling does not continually grow and deepen while he looks. The face is so amazing, that I have often tried to imagine the sensations of him who first discovered it peering from the top of the mountain with such absorbed, open-mouthed wonder. Again I see the tired Indian hunter, pausing to slake his thirst by the lake-side, start as his gaze suddenly encounters this terrific apparition. I fancy the half-uttered exclamation sticking in his throat. I behold him standing there with bated breath, not daring to stir hand or foot, his white lips parted, his scared eyes dilated, until his own swarthy features exactly reflect that unearthly, that intense amazement stamped large and vivid upon the livid rock. There he remains, rooted to the spot, unable to reason, trembling in every limb. For him there are no accidents of nature; for him everything has its design. His moment of terrible suspense is hardly difficult to understand, seeing how careless thousands that come and go are thrilled, and awed, and silenced, notwithstanding you tell them the face is nothing but rocks.
If the effect upon minds of the common order be so pronounced, a first sight of the Great Stone Face may easily be supposed to act powerfully upon the imaginative and impressible. The novelist, Hawthorne, makes it the interpreter of a noble life. For him the Titanic countenance is radiant with majestic benignity. He endows it with a soul, surrounds the colossal brow with the halo of a spiritual grandeur, and, marshalling his train of phantoms, proceeds to pass inexorable judgment upon them. Another legend – like its predecessor, too long for our pages – runs to the effect that a painter who had resolved to paint Christ sitting in judgment, and who was filled with the grandeur of his subject, wandered up and down the great art palaces, the cathedrals of the Old World, seeking in vain a model which should in all things be the embodiment of his ideal. In despair at the futility of his search he hears a strange report, brought by some pious missionaries from the New World, of a wonderful image of the human face which the Indians looked upon with sacred veneration. The painter immediately crossed the sea, and caused himself to be guided to the spot, where he beheld, in the profile of the great White Mountains, the object of his search and fulfilment of his dream. The legend is entitled Christus Judex.
Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his “Manfred,” the scene of which is laid among the mountains of the Bernese Alps, would doubtless have had a deeper and perhaps gloomier impulse; but even among the eternal realms of ice the poet never beheld an object that could so arouse the gloomy exaltation he has breathed into that tragedy. His line —
“Bound to earth, he lifts his eye to heaven” —
becomes descriptive here.
Again and again we turn to the face. We go away to wonder if it is still there. We come back to wonder still more. An emotion of pity mingles with the rest. Time seems to have passed it by. It seems undergoing some terrible sentence. It is a greater riddle than the gigantic stone face on the banks of the Nile.
All effects of light and shadow are so many changes of countenance or of expression. I have seen the face cut sharp and clear as an antique cameo upon the morning sky. I have seen it suffused, nay, almost transfigured, in the sunset glow. Often and often does a cloud rest upon its brow. I have seen it start fitfully out of the flying scud to be the next moment smothered in clouds. I have heard the thunder roll from its lips of stone. I recall the sunken cheeks, wet with the damps of its night-long vigil, glistening in the morning sunshine – smiling through tears. I remember its emaciated visage streaked and crossed with wrinkles that the snow had put there in a night; but never have I seen it insipid or commonplace. On the contrary, the overhanging brow, the antique nose, the protruding under-lip, the massive chin, might belong to another Prometheus chained to the rock, but whom no punishment could make lower his haughty head.
I lingered by the margin of the lake watching the play of the clouds upon the water, until a loud and resonant peal, followed by large, warm drops, admonished me to seek the nearest shelter. And what thunder! The hills rocked. What echoes! The mountains seemed knocking their stony heads together. What lightning! The very heavens cracked with the flashes.
“Far along
From peak to peak the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!”
III.
THE KING OF FRANCONIA
Hills draw like heaven
And stronger, sometimes, holding out their hands
To pull you from the vile flats up to them.
E. B. Browning.
AT noon we reached the spacious and inviting Profile House, which is hid away in a deep and narrow glen, nearly two thousand feet above the sea. No situation could be more sequestered or more charming. The place seems stolen from the unkempt wilderness that shuts it in. An oval, grassy plain, not extensive, but bright and smiling, spreads its green between a grisly precipice and a shaggy mountain. And there, if you-will believe me, in front of the long, white-columned hotel, like a Turkish rug on a carpet, was a pretty flower-garden. Like those flowers on the lawn were beauties sauntering up and down in exquisite morning toilets, coquetting with their bright-colored parasols, and now and then glancing up at the grim old mountains with that air of elegant disdain which is so redoubtable a weapon – even in the mountains. Little children fluttered about the grass like beautiful butterflies, and as unmindful of the terrors that hovered over them so threateningly. Nurses in their stiff grenadier caps and white aprons, lackeys in livery, cadets in uniform, elegant equipages, blooded horses, dainty shapes on horseback, cavaliers, and last, but not least, the resolute pedestrian, or the gentlemen strollers up and down the shaded avenues, made up a scene as animated as attractive. There is tonic in the air: there is healing in the balm of these groves. Even the horses step out more briskly. Peals of laughter startle the solemn old woods. You hear them high up the mountain side. There go a pair of lovers, the gentleman with his book, whose most telling passages he has carefully conned, the lady with her embroidery, over which she bends lower as he reads on. Ah, happy days! What is this youth, which, having it, we are so eager to escape, and, when it is gone, we look back upon with such longing?
The lofty crag opposite the hotel is Eagle Cliff, a name at once legitimate and satisfying, although it is now untenanted by the eagles which formerly made their home in the security of its precipitous rocks. The cliff is also seen to great advantage from Echo Lake, half a mile farther on, of which it constitutes a striking feature. In simple parlance it is an advanced spur of Mount Lafayette. The high and curving wall of this cliff encloses on one side the Profile Glen, while Mount Cannon forms the other. The precipices tower so far above the glen that large trees look like shrubs. Behind Eagle Cliff, almost isolating it from the mountain, of which it is the barbacan, a hideous ravine yawns upon the pass. Here and there, among the thick-set evergreen trees, beech and birch and maple, spread masses of rich green, and mottle it with softness. The purple rock bulges daringly out, forming a parapet of adamant.
The turf underneath the cliff was most beautifully and profusely spangled with the delicate pink anemone, the fleur des fées, that pale darling of our New England woods, to which the arbutus resigns the sceptre of spring. It is a moving sight to see these little drooping flowers, so shy and modest, yet so meek and trustful, growing at the foot of a bare and sterile rock. The face hardened looking up; grew soft looking down. “Don’t tread on us!” “May not a flower look up at a mountain?” they seem to plead. Lightly fall the dews upon your upturned faces, dear little flowers! Soft be the sunshine and gentle the winds that kiss those sky-tinted cheeks! In thy sweet purity and innocence I see faces that are beneath the sod, flowers that have blossomed in Paradise.
We see also, from the hotel, the singular rock that occasioned the change of name from Profile to Cannon Mountain. It nearly resembles a piece of heavy ordnance protruding, threateningly, from the parapet of a fortress.
Taking one of the well-worn paths conducting to the water-side, a few minutes’ walk brings us to the shore of Echo Lake, with Eagle Cliff now rising grandly on our right. Nowhere among the White Hills is there a fuller realization of a mountain lake than this. Light flaws frost it with silver. Sharp keels cut it as diamonds cut glass. The water is so transparent that you see fishes swimming or floating indolently about.
Echo Lake is somewhat larger than Profile Lake, and is only a step from the road. Its sources are in the hundred streams that descend the surrounding mountains, and its waters are discharged by the valley, lying between us and the heights of Bethlehem, into the Ammonoosuc. Therefore, in coming from one lake to the other we have crossed the summit of the pass. On one side the waters flow to the Merrimac, on the other to the Connecticut. An idle fancy tempted me to bring a cup of water from Profile and cast it into Echo Lake, forgetting that, although divided in their lives, the twin lakes had yet a common destiny in the abyss of the ocean. I found the outlook from the boat-house on the whole the most satisfying, because one looks back directly through the deep chasm of the Notch.
In this beautiful little mountain-tarn the true artist finds his ideal. The snowy peak of Lafayette looked down into it with a freezing stare. Cannon Mountain now showed his retreating wall on the right. The huge, castellated rampart of Eagle Cliff lifted on its borders precipices dripping with moisture, and glistening in the sun like casements. Except for the lake, the whole aspect would be irredeemably savage and forbidding – a blind landscape; but when the sun sinks behind the long ridge of Mount Cannon, purpling all these grisly crags, and the cloaked shadows, groping their way foot by foot up the ravines, seem spectres risen from the depths of the lake, you see, underneath the cliffs, long and slender spears of golden light thrust deep into its black and glossy tide, crimsoning it as with its own life-blood. Then, too, is the proper moment for surprising these vain old mountains viewing themselves in their mountain mirror, in which the bald, the wrinkled, and the decrepit appear young, vigorous, and gloriously fair; to see them gloating over their swarthy features like the bandit in “Fra Diavolo.” Their ragged mantles are changed to gaudy cashmeres, picturesquely twisted about their brawny shoulders, their snows to laces. Oh the pomp, the majesty of these sunsets, which so glorify the upturned faces of the haggard cliffs; which transmute, as in the miracle, water into wine; which instantly transform these rugged mountain walls into gates of jasper, and ruby, and onyx – glowing, effulgent, enrapturing! And then, after the sun drops wearily down the west, that gauze-like vapor, spun from the breath of evening, rising like incense from the surface of the lake, which the mountains put on for the masque of night; and, finally, the inquisitive stars piercing the lake with ice-cold gleams, or the full-moon breaking in one great burst of splendor on its level surface!
The echo adds its feats of ventriloquism. The marvel of the phonograph is but a mimicry of Nature, the universal teacher. Now the man blows a strong, clear blast upon a long Alpine horn, and, like a bugle-call flying from camp to camp, the martial signal is repeated, not once, but again and again, in waves of bewitching sweetness and with the exquisite modulations of the wood-thrush’s note. From covert to covert, now here, now there, it chants its rapturous melody. Once again it glides upon the entranced ear, and still we lean in breathless eagerness to catch the last faint cadence sighing itself away upon the palpitating air. A cannon was then fired. The report and echo came with the flash. In a moment more a deep and hollow rumbling sound, as if the mountains were splitting their huge sides with suppressed laughter, startled us.
The ascent of Mount Lafayette fittingly crowns the series of excursions through which we have passed since leaving Plymouth. This mountain dominates the valleys north and south with undisputed sway. It is the King of Franconia.
At seven in the morning I crossed the little clearing, and, turning into the path leading to the summit, found myself at the beginning of a steep ascent. It was one of the last and fairest days of that bright season which made the poet exclaim,
“And what is so fair as a day in June?”
The thunder-storm of the previous afternoon, which continued its furious cannonade at intervals throughout the night, had purified the air and given promise of a day favorable for the ascension. No clouds were upon the mountains. Everything betokened a pacific disposition.
The path at once attacks the south side of Eagle Cliff. A short way up, openings afford fine views of Mount Cannon and its weird profile, of the valley below, and of the glen we have just left. The stupendous mass of Eagle Cliff, suspended a thousand feet over your head, accelerates the pace.
After an hour of steady, but not rapid, climbing, the path turned abruptly under the shattered, but still formidable, precipices of the cliff, which rose some distance higher, skirted it awhile, and then began to zigzag among huge rocks along the narrow ridge uniting the cliff with the mass of the mountain. Two deep ravines fall away on either side. For two or three hundred yards, from the time the shoulder of the cliff is turned until the mountain itself is reached, the walk is as romantic an episode of mountain climbing as any I can recall, except the narrow gully of Chocorua. But this passage presents no such difficulties as must be overcome there. Although heaped with rocks, the way is easy, and is quite level. In one place, where it glides between two prodigious masses of rock dislodged from the cliff, it is so narrow as to admit only a single person at a time. When I turned to look back down the black ravine, cutting into the south side of the mountain, my eye met nothing but immense rocks stopped in their descent on the very edge of the gulf. It is among these that a way has been found for the path, which was to me a reminiscence of the high defiles of the Isthmus of Darien; to complete the illusion, nothing was now wanting except the tinkling bells of the mules and the song of the muleteer. I climbed upon one of the high rocks, and gazed to my full content upon the granite parapet of Mount Cannon.
In a few rods more the path encountered the great ravine opening into the valley of Gale River. Through its wide trough brilliant strips of this valley gleamed out far below. The village of Franconia and the heights of Lisbon and Bethlehem now appeared on this side.
I think that the perception of a distance climbed is greater to one who is looking down from a great height than to one looking up. Doubtless the imagination, which associates the plunging lines of a deep gorge with the horror of a fall, has much to do with this impression. Upon crossing a bridge of logs, the peak of Lafayette leaped up; yet so distant as to promise no easy conquest. Somewhere down the gorge I heard the roar of a brook; then the report of the cannon at Echo Lake; but up here there was no echo.
The usual indications now assured me that I was nearing the top. In three-quarters of an hour from the time of leaving the natural bridge, joining Eagle Cliff with the mountain, I stood upon the first of the great billows which, rolling in to a common centre, appear to have forced the true summit a thousand feet higher.
The first, perhaps the most curious, thing that I noticed – for one hardly suspects the existence of considerable bodies of water in these high regions, and, therefore, never comes upon them except unawares – was two little lakelets, nestling in the hollow between me and the main peak. Reposing amid the sterility of the high peaks, these lakes surround themselves with such plants as have survived the ascent from below, or, nourished by the snows of the summit, those that never do descend into temperate climates. Thus an appearance of fertility – one of those deceptions that we welcome, knowing it to be such – greets us unexpectedly. But its appearance is weird and forbidding. Here the extremes of arctic and temperate vegetation meet and embrace; here the flowers of the valley annually visit their pale sisters, banished by Nature to these Siberian solitudes; and here the rough, strong Alpine grass, striking its roots deep among the atoms of sand, granite, or flint, lives almost in defiance of Nature herself; and when the snows come and the freezing north winds blow, and it can no longer stand erect, throws itself upon the tender plants, like a brave soldier expiring on the body of his helpless comrade, saved by his own devotion.
But these Alpine lakes always provoke a smile. When some distance beyond the Eagle Lakes, as they are called, and higher, I caught, underneath a wooded ridge of Cannon, the sparkle of one hidden among the summits on the opposite side of the Notch. The immense, solitary Kinsman Mountain overtops Cannon as easily as Cannon does Eagle Cliff. In its dark setting of the thickest and blackest forests this lake blazed like one of the enormous diamonds which our forefathers so firmly believed existed among these mountains. They call this water – only to be discovered by getting above it – Lonesome Lake, and in summer it is the chosen retreat of one well known to American literature, whom the mountains know, and who knows them.
I descended the slope to the plateau on which the lakes lie, soon gaining the rush-grown shore of the nearest. Its water was hardly drinkable, but your thirsty climber is not apt to be too fastidious. These lakes are prettier from a distance; the spongy and yielding moss, the sickly yellow sedge surrounding them, and the rusty brown of the brackish water, do not invite us to tarry long.
The ascent of the pinnacle now began. It is too much a repetition, though by no means as toilsome, of the Mount Washington climb to merit particular description. This peak, too, seems disinherited by Nature. The last trees encountered are the stunted firs with distorted little trunks, which it may have required half a century to grow as thick as the wrist. I left the region of Alpine trees to enter that of gray rocks, constantly increasing in size toward the summit, where they were confusedly piled in ragged ridges, one upon another, looming large and threateningly in the distance. But as often as I stopped to breathe I scanned “the landscape o’er” with all the delight of a wholly new experience. The fascination of being on a mountain-top has yet to be explained. Perhaps, after all, it is not susceptible of analysis.
After gaining the highest visible point, to find the real summit still beyond, I stopped to drink at a delicious spring trickling from underneath a large rock, around which the track wound. I was now among the ruin and demolition of the summit, standing in the midst of a vast atmospheric ocean.
Had I staked all my hopes upon the distant view, no choice but disappointment was mine to accept. Steeped in the softest, dreamiest azure that ever dull earth borrowed from bright heaven, a hundred peaks lifted their airy turrets on high. These castles of the air – for I will maintain that they were nothing else – loomed with enchanting grace, the nearest like battlements of turquoise and amethyst, or, receding through infinite gradations to the merest shadows, seemed but the dusky reflection of those less remote. The air was full of illusions. There was bright sunshine, yet only a deluge of semi-opaque golden vapor. There were forms without substance. See those iron-ribbed, deep-chested mountains! I declare it seemed as if a swallow might fly through them with ease! Over the great Twin chain were traced, apparently on the air itself, some humid outlines of surpassing grace which I recognized for the great White Mountains. It was a dream of the great poetic past: of the golden age of Milton and of Dante. The mountains seemed dissolving and floating away before my eyes.
Stretched beneath the huge land-billows, the valleys – north, south, or west – reflected the fervid sunshine with softened brilliance, and all those white farms and hamlets spotting them looked like flakes of foam in the hollows of an immense ocean.
Heaven forbid that I should profane such a scene with the dry recital of this view or that! I did not even think of it. A study of one of Nature’s most capricious moods interested me far more than a study of topography. How should I know that what I saw were mountains, when the earth itself was not clearly distinguishable? Alone, surrounded by all these delusions, I had, indeed, a support for my feet, but none whatever for the bewildered senses.
I found the mountain-top untenanted except by horse-flies, black gnats, and active little black spiders. These swarmed upon the rocks. I also found buttercups, the mountain-cranberry, and a heath, bearing a little white flower, blossoming near the summit. There were the four walls of a ruined building, a cairn, and a signal-staff to show that some one had been before me. This staff is 5259 feet above the ocean, or 3245 feet above the summit of the Franconia Pass.
The ascent required about three, and the descent about two hours. The distance is not much less than four miles; but, these miles being a nearly uninterrupted climb from the base to the summit of the mountain, haste is out of the question, if going up, and imprudent, if coming down. There are no breakneck or dangerous places on the route; nor any where the traveller is liable to lose his way, even in a fog, except on the first summit, where the new and old paths meet, and where a guide-board should be erected.