SILVER, GOLD AND COMMERCE
I
Cobalt is a fantasy town. It is a Rackham
drawing with all its little grey houses
perched up on queer shelves and masses of
greeny-grey rock. Its streets are whimsical. They
wander up and down levels, and in and out of houses,
and sometimes they are roads and sometimes they
are stairs. One glance at them and I began to
repeat, "There was a crooked man, who walked a
crooked mile." A delightful genius had done the
town to illustrate that rhyme.
And the rope railways that sent a procession of
emotionless buckets across the train when we pulled
in, the greeny-grey lake that presently (inside the
town) ceased being a lake and became a big lake
basin of smooth, greeny-grey mine slime, the vast
greeny-grey mounds of mill refuse, the fantastic
spideriness of the lattice mill workings, and humped
corrugated iron sheds, all of them slightly
greeny-grey in the prevailing fashion--the whole picture
was fantastic; indeed, Cobalt appears a city of gnomes.
We had travelled all Tuesday and Wednesday,
striking east from Winnipeg, only stopping occasionally
for the Prince to return the courtesies of the