My readers were promised an account of Spaniard's Cave on Nipple-Top
Mountain in the Adirondacks, if such a cave exists, and could be found.
There is none but negative evidence that this is a mere cave of the
imagination, the void fancy of a vacant hour; but it is the duty of the
historian to present the negative testimony of a fruitless expedition in
search of it, made last summer. I beg leave to offer this in the simple
language befitting all sincere exploits of a geographical character.
The summit of Nipple-Top Mountain has been trodden by few white men of
good character: it is in the heart of a hirsute wilderness; it is itself
a rough and unsocial pile of granite nearly five thousand feet high,
bristling with a stunted and unpleasant growth of firs and balsams, and
there is no earthly reason why a person should go there. Therefore we
went. In the party of three there was, of course, a chaplain. The guide
was Old Mountain Phelps, who had made the ascent once before, but not
from the northwest side, the direction from which we approached it. The
enthusiasm of this philosopher has grown with his years, and outlived
his endurance: we carried our own knapsacks and supplies, therefore, and
drew upon him for nothing but moral reflections and a general knowledge
of the wilderness. Our first day's route was through the Gill-brook
woods and up one of its branches to the head of Caribou Pass, which
separates Nipple Top from Colvin.
It was about the first of September; no rain had fallen for several
weeks, and this heart of the forest was as dry as tinder; a lighted
match dropped anywhere would start a conflagration. This dryness has its
advantages: the walking is improved; the long heat has expressed all the
spicy odors of the cedars and balsams, and the woods are filled with a
soothing fragrance; the waters of the streams, though scant and clear,
are cold as ice; the common forest chill is gone from the air. The
afternoon was bright; there was a feeling of exultation and adventure
in stepping off into the open but pathless forest; the great stems of
deciduous trees were mottled with patches of sunlight, which brought
out upon the variegated barks and mosses of the old trunks a thousand
shifting hues. There is nothing like a primeval wood for color on a
sunny day. The shades of green and brown are infinite; the dull red of
the hemlock bark glows in the sun, the russet of the changing moose-bush
becomes brilliant; there are silvery openings here and there; and
everywhere the columns rise up to the canopy of tender green which
supports the intense blue sky and holds up a part of it from falling
through in fragments to the floor of the forest. Decorators can learn
here how Nature dares to put blue and green in juxtaposition: she has
evidently the secret of harmonizing all the colors.
The way, as we ascended, was not all through open woods; dense masses
of firs were encountered, jagged spurs were to be crossed, and the going
became at length so slow and toilsome that we took to the rocky bed of
a stream, where bowlders and flumes and cascades offered us sufficient
variety. The deeper we penetrated, the greater the sense of savageness
and solitude; in the silence of these hidden places one seems to
approach the beginning of things. We emerged from the defile into an
open basin, formed by the curved side of the mountain, and stood silent
before a waterfall coming down out of the sky in the centre of the
curve. I do not know anything exactly like this fall, which some
poetical explorer has named the Fairy-Ladder Falls. It appears to have
a height of something like a hundred and fifty feet, and the water
falls obliquely across the face of the cliff from left to right in short
steps, which in the moonlight might seem like a veritable ladder for
fairies. Our impression of its height was confirmed by climbing the very
steep slope at its side some three or four hundred feet. At the top we
found the stream flowing over a broad bed of rock, like a street in the
wilderness, slanting up still towards the sky, and bordered by low firs
and balsams, and bowlders completely covered with moss. It was above the
world and open to the sky.
On account of the tindery condition of the woods we made our fire on the
natural pavement, and selected a smooth place for our bed near by on the
flat rock, with a pool of limpid water at the foot. This granite couch
we covered with the dry and springy moss, which we stripped off in heavy
fleeces a foot thick from the bowlders. First, however, we fed upon the
fruit that was offered us. Over these hills of moss ran an exquisite
vine with a tiny, ovate, green leaf, bearing small, delicate berries,
oblong and white as wax, having a faint flavor of wintergreen and the
slightest acid taste, the very essence of the wilderness; fairy food, no
doubt, and too refined for palates accustomed to coarser viands. There
must exist somewhere sinless women who could eat these berries without
being reminded of the lost purity and delicacy of the primeval senses.
Every year I doubt not this stainless berry ripens here, and is
unplucked by any knight of the Holy Grail who is worthy to eat it,
and keeps alive, in the prodigality of nature, the tradition of the
unperverted conditions of taste before the fall. We ate these berries, I
am bound to say, with a sense of guilty enjoyment, as if they had been
a sort of shew-bread of the wilderness, though I cannot answer for
the chaplain, who is by virtue of his office a little nearer to these
mysteries of nature than I. This plant belongs to the heath family, and
is first cousin to the blueberry and cranberry. It is commonly called
the creeping snowberry, but I like better its official title of
chiogenes,--the snow-born.
Our mossy resting-place was named the Bridal Chamber Camp, in the
enthusiasm of the hour, after darkness fell upon the woods and the stars
came out. We were two thousand five hundred feet above the common world.
We lay, as it were, on a shelf in the sky, with a basin of illimitable
forests below us and dim mountain-passes-in the far horizon.
And as we lay there courting sleep which the blinking stars refused to
shower down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire,
which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent element that
comes and goes in a mysterious manner, as we see flame spring up
and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a
mysterious relation to the source of all things. “That flame,” he says,
“you have put out, but where has it gone?” We could not say, nor whether
it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour,
and then vanishes away. Our own philosophy of the correlation of forces
found no sort of favor at that elevation, and we went to sleep leaving
the principle of fire in the apostolic category of “any other creature.”
At daylight we were astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire
into our service to make a pot of tea, we carefully extinguished it or
sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the climb of some
thing over two thousand feet. The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine
peak has a compensating glory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple
Top had no stimulus of this sort. It is simply hard work, for which the
strained muscles only get the approbation of the individual conscience
that drives them to the task. The pleasure of such an ascent is
difficult to explain on the spot, and I suspect consists not so much in
positive enjoyment as in the delight the mind experiences in tyrannizing
over the body. I do not object to the elevation of this mountain, nor to
the uncommonly steep grade by which it attains it, but only to the other
obstacles thrown in the way of the climber. All the slopes of Nipple
Top are hirsute and jagged to the last degree. Granite ledges interpose;
granite bowlders seem to have been dumped over the sides with no more
attempt at arrangement than in a rip-rap wall; the slashes and windfalls
of a century present here and there an almost impenetrable chevalier des
arbres; and the steep sides bristle with a mass of thick balsams, with
dead, protruding spikes, as unyielding as iron stakes. The mountain
has had its own way forever, and is as untamed as a wolf; or rather
the elements, the frightful tempests, the frosts, the heavy snows, the
coaxing sun, and the avalanches have had their way with it until its
surface is in hopeless confusion. We made our way very slowly; and it
was ten o'clock before we reached what appeared to be the summit, a
ridge deeply covered with moss, low balsams, and blueberry-bushes.
I say, appeared to be; for we stood in thick fog or in the heart of
clouds which limited our dim view to a radius of twenty feet. It was a
warm and cheerful fog, stirred by little wind, but moving, shifting, and
boiling as by its own volatile nature, rolling up black from below and
dancing in silvery splendor overhead As a fog it could not have been
improved; as a medium for viewing the landscape it was a failure and we
lay down upon the Sybarite couch of moss, as in a Russian bath, to await
revelations.
We waited two hours without change, except an occasional hopeful
lightness in the fog above, and at last the appearance for a moment
of the spectral sun. Only for an instant was this luminous promise
vouchsafed. But we watched in intense excitement. There it was again;
and this time the fog was so thin overhead that we caught sight of a
patch of blue sky a yard square, across which the curtain was instantly
drawn. A little wind was stirring, and the fog boiled up from the valley
caldrons thicker than ever. But the spell was broken. In a moment more
Old Phelps was shouting, “The sun!” and before we could gain our feet
there was a patch of sky overhead as big as a farm. “See! quick!” The
old man was dancing like a lunatic. There was a rift in the vapor at
our feet, down, down, three thousand feet into the forest abyss, and lo!
lifting out of it yonder the tawny side of Dix,--the vision of a second,
snatched away in the rolling fog. The play had just begun. Before
we could turn, there was the gorge of Caribou Pass, savage and dark,
visible to the bottom. The opening shut as suddenly; and then, looking
over the clouds, miles away we saw the peaceful farms of the Au Sable
Valley, and in a moment more the plateau of North Elba and the sentinel
mountains about the grave of John Brown. These glimpses were as fleeting
as thought, and instantly we were again isolated in the sea of mist. The
expectation of these sudden strokes of sublimity kept us exultingly
on the alert; and yet it was a blow of surprise when the curtain was
swiftly withdrawn on the west, and the long ridge of Colvin, seemingly
within a stone's throw, heaved up like an island out of the ocean,
and was the next moment ingulfed. We waited longer for Dix to show its
shapely peak and its glistening sides of rock gashed by avalanches. The
fantastic clouds, torn and streaming, hurried up from the south in haste
as if to a witch's rendezvous, hiding and disclosing the great summit
in their flight. The mist boiled up from the valley, whirled over the
summit where we stood, and plunged again into the depths. Objects were
forming and disappearing, shifting and dancing, now in sun and now gone
in fog, and in the elemental whirl we felt that we were “assisting” in
an original process of creation. The sun strove, and his very striving
called up new vapors; the wind rent away the clouds, and brought new
masses to surge about us; and the spectacle to right and left, above
and below, changed with incredible swiftness. Such glory of abyss and
summit, of color and form and transformation, is seldom granted to
mortal eyes. For an hour we watched it until our vast mountain was
revealed in all its bulk, its long spurs, its abysses and its savagery,
and the great basins of wilderness with their shining lakes, and the
giant peaks of the region, were one by one disclosed, and hidden and
again tranquil in the sunshine.
Where was the cave? There was ample surface in which to look for it. If
we could have flitted about, like the hawks that came circling round,
over the steep slopes, the long spurs, the jagged precipices, I have no
doubt we should have found it. But moving about on this mountain is not
a holiday pastime; and we were chiefly anxious to discover a practicable
mode of descent into the great wilderness basin on the south, which we
must traverse that afternoon before reaching the hospitable shanty
on Mud Pond. It was enough for us to have discovered the general
whereabouts of the Spanish Cave, and we left the fixing of its exact
position to future explorers.
The spur we chose for our escape looked smooth in the distance; but we
found it bristling with obstructions, dead balsams set thickly together,
slashes of fallen timber, and every manner of woody chaos; and when
at length we swung and tumbled off the ledge to the general slope, we
exchanged only for more disagreeable going. The slope for a couple of
thousand feet was steep enough; but it was formed of granite rocks all
moss-covered, so that the footing could not be determined, and at short
intervals we nearly went out of sight in holes under the treacherous
carpeting. Add to this that stems of great trees were laid
longitudinally and transversely and criss-cross over and among the
rocks, and the reader can see that a good deal of work needs to be done
to make this a practicable highway for anything but a squirrel....
We had had no water since our daylight breakfast: our lunch on the
mountain had been moistened only by the fog. Our thirst began to be that
of Tantalus, because we could hear the water running deep down among
the rocks, but we could not come at it. The imagination drank the
living stream, and we realized anew what delusive food the imagination
furnishes in an actual strait. A good deal of the crime of this world,
I am convinced, is the direct result of the unlicensed play of the
imagination in adverse circumstances. This reflection had nothing to do
with our actual situation; for we added to our imagination patience, and
to our patience long-suffering, and probably all the Christian virtues
would have been developed in us if the descent had been long enough.
Before we reached the bottom of Caribou Pass, the water burst out from
the rocks in a clear stream that was as cold as ice. Shortly after, we
struck the roaring brook that issues from the Pass to the south. It is
a stream full of character, not navigable even for trout in the upper
part, but a succession of falls, cascades, flumes, and pools that would
delight an artist. It is not an easy bed for anything except water to
descend; and before we reached the level reaches, where the stream flows
with a murmurous noise through open woods, one of our party began to
show signs of exhaustion.
This was Old Phelps, whose appetite had failed the day before,--his
imagination being in better working order than his stomach: he had eaten
little that day, and his legs became so groggy that he was obliged to
rest at short intervals. Here was a situation! The afternoon was wearing
away. We had six or seven miles of unknown wilderness to traverse, a
portion of it swampy, in which a progress of more than a mile an hour is
difficult, and the condition of the guide compelled even a slower
march. What should we do in that lonesome solitude if the guide became
disabled? We couldn't carry him out; could we find our own way out
to get assistance? The guide himself had never been there before; and
although he knew the general direction of our point of egress, and was
entirely adequate to extricate himself from any position in the woods,
his knowledge was of that occult sort possessed by woodsmen which it
is impossible to communicate. Our object was to strike a trail that
led from the Au Sable Pond, the other side of the mountain-range, to an
inlet on Mud Pond. We knew that if we traveled southwestward far enough
we must strike that trail, but how far? No one could tell. If we reached
that trail, and found a boat at the inlet, there would be only a row of
a couple of miles to the house at the foot of the lake. If no boat was
there, then we must circle the lake three or four miles farther through
a cedar-swamp, with no trail in particular. The prospect was not
pleasing. We were short of supplies, for we had not expected to pass
that night in the woods. The pleasure of the excursion began to develop
itself.
We stumbled on in the general direction marked out, through a forest
that began to seem endless as hour after hour passed, compelled as we
were to make long detours over the ridges of the foothills to avoid the
swamp, which sent out from the border of the lake long tongues into
the firm ground. The guide became more ill at every step, and needed
frequent halts and long rests. Food he could not eat; and tea, water,
and even brandy he rejected. Again and again the old philosopher,
enfeebled by excessive exertion and illness, would collapse in a heap
on the ground, an almost comical picture of despair, while we stood and
waited the waning of the day, and peered forward in vain for any sign of
an open country. At every brook we encountered, we suggested a halt for
the night, while it was still light enough to select a camping-place,
but the plucky old man wouldn't hear of it: the trail might be only a
quarter of a mile ahead, and we crawled on again at a snail's pace. His
honor as a guide seemed to be at stake; and, besides, he confessed to
a notion that his end was near, and he didn't want to die like a dog
in the woods. And yet, if this was his last journey, it seemed not an
inappropriate ending for the old woodsman to lie down and give up the
ghost in the midst of the untamed forest and the solemn silences he felt
most at home in. There is a popular theory, held by civilians, that a
soldier likes to die in battle. I suppose it is as true that a woodsman
would like to “pass in his chips,”--the figure seems to be inevitable,
struck down by illness and exposure, in the forest solitude, with heaven
in sight and a tree-root for his pillow.
The guide seemed really to fear that, if we did not get out of the
woods that night, he would never go out; and, yielding to his dogged
resolution, we kept on in search of the trail, although the gathering
of dusk over the ground warned us that we might easily cross the trail
without recognizing it. We were traveling by the light in the upper sky,
and by the forms of the tree-stems, which every moment grew dimmer. At
last the end came. We had just felt our way over what seemed to be a
little run of water, when the old man sunk down, remarking, “I might as
well die here as anywhere,” and was silent.
Suddenly night fell like a blanket on us. We could neither see the guide
nor each other. We became at once conscious that miles of night on all
sides shut us in. The sky was clouded over: there wasn't a gleam of
light to show us where to step. Our first thought was to build a fire,
which would drive back the thick darkness into the woods, and boil
some water for our tea. But it was too dark to use the axe. We scraped
together leaves and twigs to make a blaze, and, as this failed, such
dead sticks as we could find by groping about. The fire was only a
temporary affair, but it sufficed to boil a can of water. The water we
obtained by feeling about the stones of the little run for an opening
big enough to dip our cup in. The supper to be prepared was fortunately
simple. It consisted of a decoction of tea and other leaves which had
got into the pail, and a part of a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread which
has been carried in a knapsack for a couple of days, bruised and handled
and hacked at with a hunting-knife, becomes an uninteresting object.
But we ate of it with thankfulness, washed it down with hot fluid, and
bitterly thought of the morrow. Would our old friend survive the night?
Would he be in any condition to travel in the morning? How were we to
get out with him or without him?
The old man lay silent in the bushes out of sight, and desired only to
be let alone. We tried to tempt him with the offer of a piece of toast:
it was no temptation. Tea we thought would revive him: he refused it. A
drink of brandy would certainly quicken his life: he couldn't touch it.
We were at the end of our resources. He seemed to think that if he
were at home, and could get a bit of fried bacon, or a piece of pie, he
should be all right. We knew no more how to doctor him than if he had
been a sick bear. He withdrew within himself, rolled himself up, so
to speak, in his primitive habits, and waited for the healing power of
nature. Before our feeble fire disappeared, we smoothed a level place
near it for Phelps to lie on, and got him over to it. But it didn't
suit: it was too open. In fact, at the moment some drops of rain fell.
Rain was quite outside of our program for the night. But the guide
had an instinct about it; and, while we were groping about some yards
distant for a place where we could lie down, he crawled away into the
darkness, and curled himself up amid the roots of a gigantic pine, very
much as a bear would do, I suppose, with his back against the trunk, and
there passed the night comparatively dry and comfortable; but of this we
knew nothing till morning, and had to trust to the assurance of a voice
out of the darkness that he was all right.
Our own bed where we spread our blankets was excellent in one
respect,--there was no danger of tumbling out of it. At first the rain
pattered gently on the leaves overhead, and we congratulated ourselves
on the snugness of our situation. There was something cheerful about
this free life. We contrasted our condition with that of tired invalids
who were tossing on downy beds, and wooing sleep in vain. Nothing was so
wholesome and invigorating as this bivouac in the forest. But, somehow,
sleep did not come. The rain had ceased to patter, and began to fall
with a steady determination, a sort of soak, soak, all about us. In
fact, it roared on the rubber blanket, and beat in our faces. The wind
began to stir a little, and there was a moaning on high. Not contented
with dripping, the rain was driven into our faces. Another suspicious
circumstance was noticed. Little rills of water got established along
the sides under the blankets, cold, undeniable streams, that interfered
with drowsiness. Pools of water settled on the bed; and the chaplain had
a habit of moving suddenly, and letting a quart or two inside, and down
my neck. It began to be evident that we and our bed were probably the
wettest objects in the woods. The rubber was an excellent catch-all.
There was no trouble about ventilation, but we found that we had
established our quarters without any provision for drainage. There was
not exactly a wild tempest abroad; but there was a degree of liveliness
in the thrashing limbs and the creaking of the tree-branches which
rubbed against each other, and the pouring rain increased in volume and
power of penetration. Sleep was quite out of the question, with so much
to distract our attention. In fine, our misery became so perfect that
we both broke out into loud and sarcastic laughter over the absurdity of
our situation. We had subjected ourselves to all this forlornness simply
for pleasure. Whether Old Phelps was still in existence, we couldn't
tell: we could get no response from him. With daylight, if he continued
ill and could not move, our situation would be little improved. Our
supplies were gone, we lay in a pond, a deluge of water was pouring down
on us. This was summer recreation. The whole thing was so excessively
absurd that we laughed again, louder than ever. We had plenty of this
sort of amusement. Suddenly through the night we heard a sort of reply
that started us bolt upright. This was a prolonged squawk. It was like
the voice of no beast or bird with which we were familiar. At first it
was distant; but it rapidly approached, tearing through the night and
apparently through the tree-tops, like the harsh cry of a web-footed
bird with a snarl in it; in fact, as I said, a squawk. It came close
to us, and then turned, and as rapidly as it came fled away through the
forest, and we lost the unearthly noise far up the mountain-slope.
“What was that, Phelps?” we cried out. But no response came; and we
wondered if his spirit had been rent away, or if some evil genius had
sought it, and then, baffled by his serene and philosophic spirit, had
shot off into the void in rage and disappointment.
The night had no other adventure. The moon at length coming up behind
the clouds lent a spectral aspect to the forest, and deceived us for a
time into the notion that day was at hand; but the rain never ceased,
and we lay wishful and waiting, with no item of solid misery wanting
that we could conceive.
Day was slow a-coming, and didn't amount to much when it came, so
heavy were the clouds; but the rain slackened. We crawled out of our
water-cure “pack,” and sought the guide. To our infinite relief he
announced himself not only alive, but in a going condition. I looked at
my watch. It had stopped at five o'clock. I poured the water out of it,
and shook it; but, not being constructed on the hydraulic principle, it
refused to go. Some hours later we encountered a huntsman, from whom I
procured some gun-grease; with this I filled the watch, and heated it in
by the fire. This is a most effectual way of treating a delicate Genevan
timepiece.
The light disclosed fully the suspected fact that our bed had been made
in a slight depression: the under rubber blanket spread in this had
prevented the rain from soaking into the ground, and we had been lying
in what was in fact a well-contrived bathtub. While Old Phelps was
pulling himself together, and we were wringing some gallons of water out
of our blankets, we questioned the old man about the “squawk,” and what
bird was possessed of such a voice. It was not a bird at all, he said,
but a cat, the black-cat of the woods, larger than the domestic animal,
and an ugly customer, who is fond of fish, and carries a pelt that is
worth two or three dollars in the market. Occasionally he blunders into
a sable-trap; and he is altogether hateful in his ways, and has the most
uncultivated voice that is heard in the woods. We shall remember him as
one of the least pleasant phantoms of that cheerful night when we lay
in the storm, fearing any moment the advent to one of us of the grimmest
messenger.
We rolled up and shouldered our wet belongings, and, before the shades
had yet lifted from the saturated bushes, pursued our march. It was a
relief to be again in motion, although our progress was slow, and it
was a question every rod whether the guide could go on. We had the day
before us; but if we did not find a boat at the inlet a day might not
suffice, in the weak condition of the guide, to extricate us from our
ridiculous position. There was nothing heroic in it; we had no object:
it was merely, as it must appear by this time, a pleasure excursion,
and we might be lost or perish in it without reward and with little
sympathy. We had something like a hour and a half of stumbling through
the swamp when suddenly we stood in the little trail! Slight as it was,
it appeared to us a very Broadway to Paradise if broad ways ever lead
thither. Phelps hailed it and sank down in it like one reprieved from
death. But the boat? Leaving him, we quickly ran a quarter of a mile
down to the inlet. The boat was there. Our shout to the guide would
have roused him out of a death-slumber. He came down the trail with the
agility of an aged deer: never was so glad a sound in his ear, he said,
as that shout. It was in a very jubilant mood that we emptied the boat
of water, pushed off, shipped the clumsy oars, and bent to the two-mile
row through the black waters of the winding, desolate channel, and over
the lake, whose dark waves were tossed a little in the morning breeze.
The trunks of dead trees stand about this lake, and all its shores are
ragged with ghastly drift-wood; but it was open to the sky, and although
the heavy clouds still obscured all the mountain-ranges we had a sense
of escape and freedom that almost made the melancholy scene lovely.
How lightly past hardship sits upon us! All the misery of the night
vanished, as if it had not been, in the shelter of the log cabin at Mud
Pond, with dry clothes that fitted us as the skin of the bear fits him
in the spring, a noble breakfast, a toasting fire, solicitude about our
comfort, judicious sympathy with our suffering, and willingness to hear
the now growing tale of our adventure. Then came, in a day of absolute
idleness, while the showers came and went, and the mountains appeared
and disappeared in sun and storm, that perfect physical enjoyment which
consists in a feeling of strength without any inclination to use it,
and in a delicious languor which is too enjoyable to be surrendered to
sleep.