The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

X.
THE GREAT NORTHERN PEAKS

 
Cradled and rocked by wind and cloud,
Safe pillowed on the summit proud,
Steadied by that encircling arm
Which holds the Universe from harm,
I knew the Lord my soul would keep,
Upon His mountain-tops asleep!
 

Lucy Larcom.

THUS I found myself again at the base of Mount Washington, but on the reverse, opposed to the Glen. Before the completion of the railway from Fabyan’s to the foot of the mountain I had passed over the intervening six miles by stage – a delightful experience; but one now steps on board an open car, which in less than half the time formerly occupied leaves him at the point where the mountain car and engine wait for him. The route lies along the foaming Ammonoosuc, and its justly admired falls, cut deep through solid granite, into the uncouth and bristling wilderness which surrounds the base of the mountain. The peculiarity of these falls does not consist in long, abrupt descents of perturbed water, but in the neatly excavated caves, rock-niches, and smoothly rounded cliffs and basins through which for some distance the impatient stream rears and plunges like a courser feeling the curb. Imperfect glimpses hardly give an idea of the curious and interesting processes of rock-cutting to one who merely looks down from the high banks above while the train is in rapid motion. It is better, therefore, to visit these falls by way of the old turnpike.

The advance up the valley which has first given us an outlook through the great Notch, on our right, presents for some time the huge green hemisphere of Mount Pleasant as the conspicuous object. The track then swerves to the left, bringing Mount Washington into view, and in a few minutes more we are at the ill-favored clump of houses and sheds at its base.

The mechanism of the road-way is very simple. The track is formed of three iron rails, firmly clamped to stout timbers, laid lengthwise upon transverse pieces, or sleepers. These are securely embedded, where the surface will allow, or raised upon trestles, where its inequalities would compel a serious deflection from a smooth or regular inclination. One of these, about half-way up the mountain, is called Jacob’s Ladder. Here the train achieves the most difficult part of the ascent. After traversing the whole line on foot, and inspecting it minutely and thoroughly, I can candidly pronounce it not only a marvel of mechanical skill, but bear witness to the scrupulous care taken to keep every timber and every bolt in its place. In two words, the structure is nothing but a ladder of wood and iron laid upon the side of the mountain.⁴³

The propelling force employed is equally simple. The engine and car merely rest upon and are kept in place by the two outer rails, while the power is applied to the middle one, which we have just called a rail, but is, more properly speaking, a little ladder of steel cogs, into which the corresponding teeth of the locomotive’s driving-wheel play – a firm hold being thus secured. The question now merely is, how much power is necessary to overcome gravity and lift the weight of the machine into the air? This cogged-rail is the fulcrum, and steam the lever. Mr. Sylvester Marsh has not precisely lifted the mountain, but he has, nevertheless, with the aid of Mr. Walter Aiken, reduced it, to all intents, to a level.

The boiler of the locomotive, inclined forward so as to preserve a horizontal position when the engine is ascending, the smoke-stack also pitched forward, give the idea of a machine that has been in a collision. Everything seems knocked out of place. But this queer-looking thing, that with bull-dog tenacity literally hangs on to the mountain with its teeth, is capable of performing a feat such as Watt never dreamed of, or Stephenson imagined. It goes up the mountain as easily as a bear climbs a tree, and like a bear.

I had often watched the last ascension of the train, which usually reaches the summit at sunset, and I had as often pleased myself with considering whether it then most resembled a big, shining beetle crawling up the mountain side, or some fiery dragon of the fabulous times, dragging his prey after him to his den, after ravaging the valley. My own turn was now come to make the trial. It was a cold afternoon in September when I entered the little carriage, not much larger than a street-car, and felt the premonitory jerk with which the ascent begins. The first hill is so steep that you look up to see the track always mounting high above your head; but one soon gets used to the novelty, and to the clatter which accompanies the incessant dropping of a pawl into the indentures of the cogged-rail, and in which he recognizes an element of safety. The train did not move faster than one could walk, but it moved steadily, except when it now and then stopped at a water-tank, standing solitary and alone upon the waste of rocks.

By the time we emerged above the forest into the chill and wind-swept desolation above it – a first sight of which is so amazing – the sun had set behind the Green Mountain summits, showing a long, serrated line of crimson peaks, above which clouds of lake floated in a sea of amber. It grew very cold. Great-coats and shawls were quickly put on. Thick darkness enveloped the mountain as we approached the head of the profound gulf separating us from Mount Clay, which is the most remarkable object seen at any time either during the ascent or descent. Into this pitchy ravine, into its midnight blackness, a long and brilliant train of sparks trailed downward from the locomotive, so that we seemed being transported heavenward in a chariot of fire. This flaming torch, lighting us on, now disclosed snow and ice on all sides. We had successfully attained the last slope which conceals the railway from the valley. Up this the locomotive toiled and panted, while we watched the stars come out and emit cold gleams around, above, beneath. The light of the Summit House twinkled small, then grew large, as, surmounting the last and steepest pitch of the pinnacle, we were pushed before a long row of lighted windows crusted thick with hoar-frost. Stiffened with cold, the passengers rushed for the open door without ceremony. In an instant the car was empty; while the locomotive, dripping with its unheard-of efforts, seemed to regard this desertion with reproachful glances.

Reader, have you ever sat beside Mrs. Dodge’s fire after such a passive ascension as that just described? After a two hours’ combat with the instinct of self-preservation, did you dream of such comforts, luxuries even, awaiting you on the bleak mountain-top, where nothing grows, and where water even congeals and refuses to run? Could you, in the highest flights of fancy, imagine that you would one day sit in the courts of heaven, or feast sumptuously amid the stars? All this you either have done or may do. And now, while the smartly-dressed waiter-girl, who seems to have donned her white apron as a personal favor, brings you the best the larder affords, pinch yourself to see if you are awake.

In several ascensions by the railway I have always remarked the same symptoms of uneasiness among the passengers, betrayed by pale faces, compressed lips, hands tightening their grasp of the chairs, or subdued and startled exclamations, quickly repressed. To escape the influence of such weird surroundings one should be absolutely stolid – a stock or a stone. So for all it is an experience more or less acute, according to his sensibility, strength of nerve, and power of self-control. However well it may be disguised, the strong equally with the weak, and more deeply than the weak, feel the strain which ninety minutes’ combat with gravitation, attraction, ponderosity, engenders. The mind does not for a single instant quit its hold of this defiance of Nature’s laws. As long as iron and steel hold fast, there is no danger; but you think iron and steel are iron and steel, and no more. An anecdote will illustrate this feeling.

After pointing out to a lady-passenger the skilful devices for stopping the engine – the pawl, the steam, and the atmospheric brakes – and after patiently explaining their mechanism and uses, the listener asked the conductor, with much interest,

“Then, if the pawl breaks while we are going up?”

“The engine will be stopped by means of these powerful brakes, applied directly to the axles, which will, of course, render the train motionless. As the locomotive has two driving-wheels, the engineer can bring a double power to bear, as you see. Each is independent of the other, so that if one gives way the other is still more than sufficient to keep the engine stationary.”

“Thank you; but the car?”

“Oh, the car is not attached to the engine at all; and should the engineer lose the control of his machine, which is not at all likely, the car can be brought to a stand-still by independent brakes of its own. You see the engine goes up behind, and in front, down; and the car is simply pushed forward, or follows it.”

“So that you consider it – .”

“Perfectly safe, madam, perfectly safe.”

“Thank you. One question more. Suppose all these things break at once. What then? Where would we go?”

“That, madam, would depend on what sort of a life you had led.”

I have still a consolation for the timid. Ten years’ trial has confirmed the declaration of its projectors, that they would make the road as safe or safer than the ordinary railway. No life has been lost by an injury to a passenger during that time. Besides, what is the difference? After its day, the railway will pass like the stage-coach – that is, unless you believe, as you do not, that the world and all progress are to stop with ourselves.

The affable lady hostess told me that she paid an annual rental of ten thousand dollars for her palace of ice; nominally for a year, but really for a term of only seventy-six days, this being the limit of the season upon the summit. During the remaining two hundred and eighty-nine days the house is closed. During four or five months it is buried, or half-buried, in a snow-drift. Of this large sum, three thousand dollars go to the Pingree heirs. These facts may tend to modify the views of those who think the charges exorbitant, if such there are.

Raising my eyes to look out of the window, the light from within fell upon a bank of snow. A man was stooping over it as if in search of something. Going out, I found him feeling it with his hands, and examining it with childish wonder and curiosity. I approached this eccentric person very softly; but he, seeing my shadow on the snow beside him, looked up.

“Can I assist you in recovering what you have lost?” I inquired.

“Thank you; no. I have lost nothing. Ah! I see,” he continued, laughing quietly, “you think I have lost my wits. But it is not so. I am a native of the East Indies, and I assure you this is the first time in my life I have ever seen snow near enough to handle it. Imagine what an experience the ascent of Mount Washington is for me!”

We took a turn down the hard-frozen Glen road together in order to see the moon come up. The telegraph-poles, fantastically crusted with ice to the thickness of a foot, stretched a line of white-hooded phantoms down the dark side of the mountain. From successive coatings of frozen mist the wires were as thick as cables. Couches of snow lay along the rocks, and fresh snow had apparently been rubbed into all the inequalties of the cliffs rising out of the Great Gulf. The scene was supremely weird, supremely desolate.

From here we crossed over to the railway, and, ascending by it, shortly came upon the heap of stones, surmounted by its tablet, erected on the spot where Miss Bourne perished while ascending the mountain, in September, 1855. The party, of which she was one, setting out in high spirits in the afternoon from the Glen House, was overtaken near the summit by clouds, which hid the house from view, and among which they became bewildered. It was here Miss Bourne declared she could go no farther. Overcome by her exertions, she sunk exhausted and fainting upon the rocks. Her friends were scarcely awakened to her true condition when, amid the surrounding darkness and gloom, this young and lovely maiden of only twenty expired in the arms of her uncle. The mourners wrapped the body in their own cloaks, and, ignorant that a few rods only separated them from the summit, kept a vigil throughout the long and weary night. We hasten over this night of dread. In the morning, discovering their destination a few rods above them, they bore the lifeless form of their companion to it with feelings not to be described. A rude bier was made, and she who had started up the mountain full of life now descended it a corpse.

The evening treated us to a magnificent spectacle. The moon, in full-orbed splendor, moved majestically up the heavens, attended by her glittering retinue of stars. Frozen peaks, reflecting the mild radiance, shone like beaten silver. But the immense hollows between, the deep valleys that had been open to view, were now inundated with a white and luminous vapor, from which the multitude of icy summits emerged like a vast archipelago – a sea of islands. This spectral ocean seemed on the point of ingulfing the mountains. This motionless sea, these austere peaks, uprising, were inconceivably weird and solemnizing. An awful hush pervaded the inanimate but threatening host of cloud-girt mountains. Upon them, upon the sea of frozen vapor, absorbing its light, the clear moon poured its radiance. The stars seemed nearer and brighter than ever before. The planets shone with piercing brilliancy; they emitted a sensible light. The Milky Way, erecting its glittering nebula to the zenith, to which it was pinned by a dazzling star, floated, a glorious, star-spangled veil, amid this vast sea of gems. One could vaguely catch the idea of an unpeopled desolation rising from the fathomless void of a primeval ocean. The peaks, incased in snow and ice, seemed stamped with the traces of its subsidence. Pale and haggard, they lifted their antique heads in silent adoration.

Going to my room and extinguishing the light, I stood for some time at the window, unable to reconcile the unwonted appearance of the stars shining far below, with the fixed idea that they ought not to be there. Yet there they were. To tell the truth, my head was filled with the surpassing pomp I had just witnessed, of which I had not before the faintest conception. I felt as if I was silently conversing with all those stars, looking at me and my petty aspirations with such inflexible, disdainful immobility. When one feels that he is nothing, self-assurance is no great thing. The conceit is taken out of him. On a mountain the man stands naked before his Maker. He is nothing. That is why I leave him there.

That night I did not sleep a wink. Twenty times I jumped out of bed and ran to the window to convince myself that it was not all a dream. No; moon and stars were still bright. Over the Great Gulf, all ghastly in the moonlight, stood Mount Jefferson in his winding-sheet. I dressed myself, and from the embrasure of my window kept a vigil.

Sunrise did not produce the startling effect I had anticipated. The morning was fine and cloudless. A gong summoned the inmates of the hotel to the spectacle. Without dressing themselves, they ran to their windows, where, wrapped in bed-blankets, they stood eagerly watching the east. To the pale emerald of early dawn a ruddy glow succeeded. Before we were aware, the rocky waste around us grew dusky red. The crimsoned air glided swiftly over the neighboring summits. Now the brightness was upon Adams and Jefferson and Clay, and now it rolled its purpled flood into the Great Gulf, to mingle with the intense blackness at the bottom. For some moments the mountain-tops held the color, then it was transfused into the clear sunshine of open day; while the vapors, heavy and compact, stretched along the valleys, still smothering the land, retained their leaden hue.

It was still early when I descended the carriage-road on my way to Mount Adams. The usual way is to keep the railway as far as the old Gulf Tank, near which is a house of refuge, provided with a cooking-stove, fuel, and beds. I continued, however, to coast the upper crags of the Great Gulf, until compelled to make directly for the southern peak of Mount Clay. The view from this col is imposing, embracing at once, and without turning the head, all the southern summits of the chain. Here I was joined by two travellers fresh from Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.

Each choosing a route for himself, we pushed on to the high summit of Clay, from which we looked down into the deep gap dividing this mountain from Jefferson. Arrived there, we resolutely attacked the eastern slopes of this fine peak, whose notched summit rose more than seven hundred and fifty feet above our heads. Patches of Alpine grasses, of reindeer-moss, interspersed with irregular ridges of stones, extended quite up to the summit, which was a mere elongated stone-heap crowning the apex of its cone. Those undulating masses encircling its bulk, half hid among the grass, were like an immense python crushing the mountain in its deadly folds. We picked our way carefully among this chaotic débris, which the Swiss aptly call “cemeteries of the devil,” tripping now and then in the long, wiry grass, or burying our feet among the hummocks of dry moss, which were so many impediments to rapid progress. This appearance and this experience were common to the whole route.

At each summit we threw ourselves upon the ground, to feast upon the landscape while regaining breath. Each halt developed more and more the grand and stupendous mass of Washington receding from the depths of the Great Gulf, along whose edge the carriage-road serpentined and finally disappeared. We saw, a little softened by distance, the horribly mutilated crags of the head wall stripped bare of all verdure, presenting on its knobbed agglomerates of tempest-gnawed granite a thousand eye-catching points and detaining as many shadows. Nothing – not even the glittering leagues of mountains and valleys shooting or slumbering above, beneath – so riveted the attention as this apparently bottomless pit of the five mountains. It was a continued wonder. It drew us by a strange magnetism to its dizzy brink, chained us there, and then abandoned us to a physical and moral vertigo, in which the power of critical investigation was lost. An invisible force seemed always dragging us toward it. Whence comes this horrible, this uncontrollable desire to throw ourselves in?

Out of the death-like torpor which eternally shrouds the ravine the smiling valley seems escaping. The crystal air of the heights grows thick in its depths. Beasts and birds of prey haunt its gloomy solitudes. An immense grave seems yawning to receive the mountains. The aged mountains seem standing with one foot in the grave.

This gulf makes an impression altogether different from the others. It is an immense ravine. Each of the five mountains pushes down into it massive buttresses of granite, forming lesser ravines between of considerable extent. Through these streams trickle down from invisible sources. But these buttresses, which fall lightly and gracefully as folds of velvet from summit to base of the highest mountains, these ravines, are hardly noticed. The insatiable maw of the gulf swallows them as easily as an anaconda a rabbit. In immensity, which you do not easily grasp, in grandeur, which you do not know how to measure, this has no partakers here. Even the great Carter Mountain, rising from the Peabody Valley, seems no more than a stone rolled away from the entrance of this enormous sepulchre.

Our first difficulties were encountered upon the reverse of Mount Jefferson, from whose side rocky spurs detached themselves, and, jutting out from the side of the mountain, formed an irregular line of cliffs of varying height, in the way we had selected for the descent. But these were no great affair. We now had the Ravine of the Castles upon our left, the stately pyramid of Adams in front, and, beneath, the deep hollow between this mountain and the one we were descending. We had the little hamlet of East Jefferson at the mouth of the ravine, and that crowd of peaks, tightly wedged between the waters of the Connecticut and the Androscoggin, looming above it.

A deviation to the left enabled us to approach the Castellated Ridge, which is, beyond dispute, the most extraordinary rock-formation the whole extent of the range can show. As it is then fully before you, it is seen to much better advantage when approached from Mount Adams. I do not know who gave it this name, but none could be more felicitous or expressive. It is a sloping ridge of red-brown granite, broken at its summit into a long line of picturesque towers and battlements, rising threateningly over an escarpment of débris. Such an illusion is too rarely encountered to be easily forgotten. It is hardly possible to doubt you are really looking at an antique ruin. One would like to wander among these pre-Adamite fortifications, which curiously remind him of the old Spanish fortresses among the Pyrenees. From the opposite side of the ravine – for I had not the time requisite for a closer examination – the rock composing the most elevated portion of the ridge appears to have been split perpendicularly down, probably by frost, allowing these broken columns and shafts to stand erect upon the verge of the abyss. In the warm afternoon light, when the shadows fall, it is hardly possible to conceive a finer picture of a crumbling but still formidable mountain fortress. Bastions and turrets stand boldly out. Each broken shaft sends a long shadow streaming down into the ravine, whose high and deeply-furrowed sides are thus beautifully striped with dusk-purple, while the sunlit parts retain a greenish-gray.

At the foot of Jefferson we found, concealed among rushes, a spring, which refreshed us like wells of the desert the parched and fainting Arab. From here two routes offered themselves. One was by keeping the curved ridge, rising gradually to a subordinate peak (Samuel Adams),⁴⁴ and to the foot of the summit itself; a second was by crossing the ground sloping downward from this ridge into the Great Gulf. We chose the latter, notwithstanding the dwarf-spruce, advancing well up to the foot of the ridge, promised a warm reception.

At last, after sustaining a vigorous tussle with the scrub-firs, and stopping to unearth a brook whose waters purred underneath stones, I stood at the foot of the pointed shaft I had so often seen wedged into the sky. Five hundred feet or more of the apex of this pyramid is apparently formed of broken rocks, dropped one by one into place. Nothing like a ledge or a cliff is to be seen: only these ponderous, sharp-edged masses of cold gray stone, lifted one above another to the tapering point. Up this mutilated pyramid we began a slow advance. It was necessary to carefully choose one step before taking another, in order to avoid plunging into the deep crevasses traversing the peak in every direction. At last I placed my foot upon the topmost crag.

No one can help regarding this peak with the open admiration which is its due. You conceive that every mountain ought to have a pinnacle. Well, here it is. We could easily have stood astride the culminating point. But how came these rocks here? and what was the primitive structure, if these fragments we see are its relics? One hardly believes that an ice-raft could have first transported and then deposited such misshapen masses in their present symmetrical form. Still less does he admit that the original shaft, crushed in a thousand pieces by the glacier itself, fell with such grace as to rise again, as he now sees it, from its own ruins. If, again, it proceeds from the eternal hammering of King Frost, what was the antique edifice that first rose so proudly above the frozen seas of the great primeval void? But to science the things which belong to science. We have a book describing heaven, but not one that resolves the problems of earth. The “Veni, vidi, vici,” of the Book of Genesis leaves us at the beginning. We are still staring, still questioning, still vacillating between this theory and that hypothesis.⁴⁵

We had from the summit an inspiring though not an extensive view. A bank of dun-colored smoke smirched the fair western sky as high as the summits of the Green Mountains. At fifty miles mountains and valleys melted confusedly into each other. Water emitted only a dull glimmer. Here a peak and there a summit surveyed us from afar. All else was intangible; almost imaginary. At twenty-five miles the land, resuming its ordinary appearance, was bathed in the soft brilliance caused by the sun shining through an atmosphere only half transparent.

Upon this obscure mass we traced once more the well-known objects environing the great mountain. To the south Mount Washington divided the landscape in two. For some time we stood admiring its magnificent torso, its amplitude of rock-land, its easy preponderance over every other summit. Again we followed the road down the great north-east spur. Once more we caught the white specks which denote the line of the railway. We plunged our eyes down into the Great Gulf, and lifted them to the shattered protuberances of Clay, which seemed to mark the route where the glacier crushed and ground its way through the very centre of the chain. A second time we descended Jefferson to the deep dip, opening like a trough between two enormous sea-waves, where we first saw the little Storm Lake glistening. Following now the long, rocky ridge, rolling downward toward the hamlets of Jefferson and Randolph, the mountains yawned wide at our feet. We were looking over into King’s Ravine – to its very bottom. We peered curiously into its remotest depths, traced the difficult and breathless ascent through the remarkable natural gateway at its head out upon a second ridge, on which a little pond (Star Lake) lies hid. We then crossed the gap communicating with Mount Madison, whose summit, last and lowest of the great northern peaks, dominates the Androscoggin Valley with undisputed sway. To-day it made on us scarcely an impression. Its peak, which from the valley holds a rough similitude with that of Adams, is dwarfed here. You look down upon it.

More applicable to Adams than to any other, for our eyes grow dazzled with the glitter and sparkle of countless mica-flakes incrusting the hard granite with clear brilliancy as from the facets of a diamond; more applicable, again, from the stern, unconquerable attitude of the great gray shaft itself, lifted in such conscious pride beyond the confines of the vast ethereal vault of blue – a tower of darkness invading the bright realms of light; a defiance flung by earth in the face of high heaven – is the magnificent description of the Matterhorn from the pen of Ruskin:

“If one of these little flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth’s atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen – what would it have thought had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; – that against it– poor, helpless mica-flake! – the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it – weak, wave-drifted mica-flake! – the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one, as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire!”

Myself and my companions set out on our return to the Summit House early in the afternoon, choosing this time the ridge in preference to the scrubby slope. From this we turned away, at the end of half an hour, by an obscure path leading to a boggy pool, sunk in a mossy hollow underneath it, crossed the area of scattered bowlders, strewn all around like the relics of a petrified tempest, and, filling our cups at the spring, drank to Mount Adams, the paragon of mountain peaks.

As we again approached the brow of Mount Washington the sun resembled a red-hot globe of iron flying through the west and spreading a conflagration through the heavens. Again the colossal shadow of the mountain began its stately ascension in the east. One moment the burning eye of the great luminary interrogated this phantom, sprung from the loins of the hoary peak. Then it dropped heavily down behind the Green Mountains, as it has done for thousands of years, the landscape fading, fading into one vast, shadowy abyss, out of which arose the star-lit dome of the august summit.