ask as they come forth each year with their tender leaves clasped
like hands in prayer. Through May you shall see this attitude of
supplication in the young growth all along the mountain-sides where
the shade of the woods is deep, and it lingers with the later-growing
shrubs and herbs even until this season. Most devout of these seems the
ginseng, its trinity of arms coming from the mould in this prayerful
attitude, and now that these have spread wide to receive the good and
perfect gifts that they know are coming the trinity of leaflets at
their tips are still clasped most humbly. So it is with the bellwort
and the Solomon's seal and many another gentle herb of the shadows.
Their leaf hands are clasped in prayer as they come forth, and their
heads are bowed in humble adoration all summer long. The joy of warmth
and the sweetness of summer rain are theirs already, and one might
think it was for these creature comforts that the prayer had been. But
it was not. It was, and is, for grace of bloom and the dear delight of
ripening fruit, the one deep wish of all the world.
The very summit of Iron Mountain, 2725 feet above the sea level, is
a plateau of broken rock, scattered over solid ledges which protrude
through the débris. Trees and shrubs of the slopes and the lowland
have climbed to this plateau, poplar and birch, bird cherry, sumac,
dwarf blueberries and alder, that find a footing here and there among
the crevices. Spruces, somewhat dwarfed and scattered but spiring
primly, are there, too, and the whole concourse makes the bleak rock
glade-like and friendly, yet do not altogether obstruct the outlook.
The breath of summer has pinked the young cones on the spruce tops
and robed them in the gold of pollen-bearing catkins. It has set
silver reflections shimmering from the young leaves of poplar and
birch, and the dwarf blueberries are pearled with white bloom. Other
spirits of summer are among these; alert, frantically hasty skipper
butterflies dash about among them, and a big, lank mountain variety
of bumblebee drones from clump to clump, showing a broad band of deep
orange across the gold and black of his back. He is a big and husky
mountaineer of a bee, but buzzing with him comes a clearwing moth,
the spring form of the snowberry clearwing. Hæmorrhagia diffinis,
if I am not mistaken, though I hardly expected to find this little
day-flying moth at so great an elevation so far north. The very spirit
of summer, the tiger-swallowtail butterfly, was there, too, hovering
confidingly at the tip of my pencil as I wrote about him, and with him
the black, gold-banded Eastern swallowtail, Papilio asterias, these two
the largest butterflies of the summit. Of all the insect life, large
or small, that revelled in the vivid sunlight of the thin air of the
little plateau the most numerous were the little bluebottle flies that
hummed there in swarms, very busy about their business, whatever it
was, filling the air with glints of the deepest, most scintillant azure.
* * * * *
But he who climbs Iron Mountain will not linger too long with the
summer denizens of its little rocky plateau. From the cairn which
mountaineers have built of its loose rocks the eye has a wide sweep
of the mountain world in every direction. To the south the land fades
into shadowy mountains far down the Ossipee Valley, mountains that
seem to float there in a soft, violet haze as if they were but massed
bloom of the Gulf Stream that flows and gives off its wondrous colors
half a thousand miles farther on. East the tossing sea is dappled with
green and blue as the cloud shadows follow one another over the forest
growth. West the peaks against the sun loom blue-black and stern as
they climb northward into the Presidential Range, lifting their summits
over the rough ridge of the Montalban Range till one wonders what
wildernesses lie in the shadowy ravines between the two. But whether
to the east or the west the gaze still falls upon a surging sea of
forest-clad granite, the very picture of tumultuous motion, till the
cairn beneath the gazer takes on the semblance of a mainmast-head on
which he stands, and from which the plunge of the ship may at any
moment send him whirling into space.
To look northward from this main-truck is to get a further insight into
the mystery of the motion. Here, as the clouds blow away from the upper
slopes of the highest peak, the semblance of a tossing sea vanishes,
and one seems to understand what happened here in an age long gone.
Once upon a time this mountain earth must have been fluid, one thinks,
and the wind have blown an antediluvian gale from the northwest. It
sent great waves of earth tossing and rolling and riding southeast
before it, with clouds for crests and the blue haze of distance for
the scurrying spindrift. Then uprose from the depths of this awful sea
Mount Washington, enthroned on the Presidential Range, "clothed in
white samite, mystic, wonderful," and commanded the tumult to cease.
There it stands.
It stands, not only in the rock but in the imagination of the onlooker,
once he has found the dignity and grandeur of the highest summit,
for authority. Dignity and grandeur are the impressions which come
to one from the north through the crystal clear, thin air out of the
cool, snow-samite which still stands in the deep ravines even on the
southerly slope of the master mountain, just as illusion and romance
dwell in the violet haze which veils all the south in pleasing mystery.
Here on Iron Mountain one is lifted high in air between the two and
able with a turn of the head to see either, and again it should be said
that to know the mountains well it is best to see them from the lesser
summits of their ranges. From every one of these they stand before
the onlooker in new aspects, so different each from each that they
seem new peaks whose acquaintance he has not hitherto made. Only thus
is their many-sided completeness revealed and their full personality
brought out. Nor need the visitor be among them long before he realizes
that they have personality and grow to be individual friends, as well
loved and as ardently longed for when absent as any human neighbor or
associate. Within them dwell a deep kindliness and a strength which
goes out to those who love them, unfailing and unvarying through the
years. It is no wonder that prophets seek them, and that within the
sheltering arms of their ridges are cosy nooks where hermits build
their hermitages and find a deep peace which the cities of the world
deny them.
[Illustration: "From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge
than from this little cairn on the plateau which is the summit of Iron
Mountain"]
From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge than from this
little cairn on the plateau which is the summit of Iron Mountain. The
long ridge which rises from the east branch of the Saco to Bartlett
Mountain and goes on and up to make the summit of Kearsarge stands with
its edge toward him and vanishes against the mountain itself, leaving
its outline that of a narrow cone, rising abruptly from a plain below.
There is something spectacular in its dizzy, abrupt loom into the sky,
quivering in gray haze against the violet depths beyond, making of
it a magic peak such as the early voyagers of legendary times saw and
viewed with fear and wonder. Such a mountain as this seems was the
lodestone which drew the ship of Sinbad from the sea to be wrecked on
its base, and over it at any time might come flying a roc with the
palace of a prince of India in its talons.
The sun that sinks to his setting behind the great ridges that wall
in Crawford Notch sets their peaks in eruption, black smoke of clouds
rising from them and glowing with the reflection of lakes of lava
below and the flicker of long flames. The Presidential Range looms
and withdraws in mighty solemnity and dignity, lost in the turbid
glow of this semblance of what may have happened in æons gone, but
the reflection of these fires only deepens the amethystine gray of
Kearsarge and the purple gloom beyond it, while it touches the very
summit with a soft rose, a flower of mystery as sweet as any that ever
bloomed in legendary lore. When the watcher on the peak sees these
signs, it is time to begin the descent to the deepening shadows far
down the mountain, where the thrushes are singing vespers in tuneful
adoration, prayerfully thankful for a holy day well spent.
[Illustration: Sunset over Iron Mountain and Jackson, seen from Thorn
Mountain]
IV
JUNE ON KEARSARGE
_Butterflies and Flowers on a Summit of Splendid Isolation_
The familiar spirits of Kearsarge Mountain this June seemed to me to
be the white admiral butterflies. Clad in royal purple are these with
buttons of red and azure and broad white epaulettes which cross both
wings. These greeted me in the highway at Lower Bartlett and there was
almost always one in sight up Bartlett Mountain, over the ledges and
to the very top of Kearsarge itself. One of them politely showed me
the wrong wood road as a start for the trail up Bartlett which leaves
the highway just a little south of the east branch of the Saco. Then
when the road ended in a vast tangle of slash and new growth he showed
me what was to him a perfectly good trail still, up in the air and
over the tops of the trees and ledges in easy flight, and I dare say
he thought me very dull that I did not follow as easily as he led.
It is the season for white admirals and you may meet them in favored
places all over the mountains from now on, but nowhere have I seen them
so plentiful as they are this June along the slopes of Bartlett and
Kearsarge. A South American navy could not have more admirals.
[Illustration: Kearsarge and Bartlett, seen from Middle Mountain, near
Jackson]
With the white admirals I find, flying lower and keeping well in
shadowy nooks, a thumbnail butterfly which might well be a midshipman,
he is so much a copy on a small scale of the admiral, very dark in
ground color and having white epaulettes across both wings also. This
butterfly is new to me, nor do I find him figured in such works on
lepidoptera as I have been able to consult since I have seen him. I had
to get lost on the way up Bartlett to find him most plentiful, but his
fellows are common throughout the shady woodlands of the upper branches
of the Saco from Pinkham Notch to the borders of the Conway meadows.
In fact I fancy the whole White Mountain region is a school for these
understudies of the white admirals, and they certainly could have no
more noble exemplar.
No doubt my volunteer white admiral guide had a great contempt for any
would-be sailor that could not climb as he did when he went straight
toward the main truck of Kearsarge by way of the bobstay, but he left
me where the lumber road did, in a wild tangle of slash, to get up
the mountain the way the bear does, on all fours. There is a path up
Bartlett, a proper one that enters from the highway as the A. M. C.
guide says it does and sticks to its job after the first third of the
ascent is accomplished, but the way it flirts with the wood roads
between these two points is bewildering to the sober-minded stranger
who attempts to follow it. However, missing this slender trifler had
its compensations. I am convinced that I reached portions of the slope
of Bartlett that are rarely visited. I was long getting out of the
awful mess which lumbermen leave behind them at the upper ends of their
roads. The inextricable confusion of tangled spruce tops and the sudden
riot of new deciduous growth, wild with delight over the flood of
sunshine it gets, held me as if in a net. And all the time I wrestled
with it an indigo bunting sat on the top of a rock maple and sang his
surprise at seeing such a thing in such a place. "Dear, dear!" he
gurgled, "who is it? who is it? dear, dear, dear!" and once in a while
he added a little tittering "tee, hee, hee." It was all very well for
him. He could follow the white admiral if he were bound for the main
truck of Kearsarge by way of the Bartlett bobstay, and he looked very
handsome and capable as he glistened, iridescent blue-black up there
against the sun. How poor a creature a man is, after all! A box turtle
could have gone up through that slash better than I did.
[Illustration: From Eagle Mountain one may see Kearsarge, blue and
symmetrical in the distance, peering over the shoulder of Thorn]
* * * * *
However, man wins because he keeps everlastingly at it, and I reasoned
that if I kept climbing I would come out on top of something or other,
and I did. On top of a pretty little hill, which is an outlying,
northwesterly spur of Bartlett, a spot which gave me a glimpse of
the dark, spruce-covered summit far above and a deep ravine between
down into which I must go and begin my scramble all over again. A
no-trail trip gives one an idea of what a mountain really is, showing
him, for one thing, how rapidly it moves down into the valley beneath
it. Here on steep slopes were loose masses of angled fragments of
granite, weighing from a few pounds to a few tons each, broken from the
precipices above by the frost and ready, some of them at least, to be
toppled at a touch and start an avalanche. It needs but the footfall of
a climbing deer, a bear, or a stray man to start one rock, or two, and
it is easy to see that a down-rush of spring rain takes always a part
of the mountain with it. To go up one of the precipitous ledges, "tooth
and nail" as one must who misses the path, is to find how easily these
broken chunks, separated by the frost from the parent rock, fall out
and join the masses below.
Yet such a climb has its joys, which the path does not always give.
Here the deer have browsed and left prints of slender hoofs in the
black earth beneath the trees, there the white hare had his lair all
winter, a jutting rock sheltering him and the sun from the southwest
warming him as he crouched. Here are holes where the porcupines have
scratched their bristly way, or a cave where perhaps a bear had his
den. This the wandering stranger views with suspicion and approaches
with many delightful thrills strangely compounded of hope and fear.
Probably there are no bears on Bartlett, but what if there were one,
and nothing for defence but the majesty of the human eye! A man is
apt to get his own measure in places like these. Of course the bear,
if there be one, will run--but which way? In the wildest glen, filled
with rough dens and suspicions of bears of the largest size, I found
grateful traces of at least the former presence of men, men in bulk, so
to speak. Here, in the forest tangle, wreathed with mountain moosewood
blooms, was a good-sized cook-stove. There was no suspicion of a road,
and I could only guess that it had wandered from a lumber camp and lost
the trail, as I had. It reminded me that Bartlett summit was still
distant, more distant perhaps than the noon hour which this mountain
range also suggested, and it set me to the ascent with renewed vigor.
* * * * *
All the way up in woodsy nooks where are little levels of rich black
soil the moccasin flowers climb till the very top of Bartlett is
reached. Their rose-purple foot coverings with the greenish-purple
pointed thongs for tying seem scattered as if pukwudgies had lost
them, fleeing in terror from the bears which I could only suspect, the
mountain top their refuge, where I found them, grouped rather close
together in mossy nooks among the ledges. The dwarf cornels climb with
them, finding footing in much the same places and stare unblinkingly
up with round and chubby foolish faces. The cypripediums are sensitive
and emotional; these that climb with them are strangely stolid and
shallow by comparison, yet they add beauty of their own sort to the
wide, moss-carpeted stretches beneath the trees. On the very ledges
themselves neither of these advance, yet wherever the frosts of winter
have split the rock the slender lints of strange lettering are green
with mountain cranberry vines, and the creeping snowberry has followed
and holds rose-white blooms up to lure the mountain bees. The lichens
have painted these ledges, of which the upper part of Bartlett Mountain
is built, with wonderful soft colors of mingled grays and greens, and
the spruces spire, black and beautiful, all over the summit, making
one hunt for open spaces from which to view the world stretched out
beneath. I found the path again on the ledges well up toward the
summit, a slender, coquettish thing still, hard to follow, but enticing
with its waywardness, its most bewildering vagaries marked by former
lovers, men of the A. M. C. without doubt, little piles of stone which
lead him who trusts them to the very summit.
Here, as on that lower spur of Bartlett which I had struggled to
attain, one looks upon a greater height, with a ravine between,
Kearsarge looming grandly up into the sky to eastward. The white
admiral butterfly danced along here, too--or was it another?--seemingly
impatient at my long delay in following, and the path coquettes in
vain, down ledges and up ledges, always to be found by patient study of
those little piles of marking stone, till, breasting the steep slope
of Kearsarge itself, one enters the comparatively broad highway which
leads up from Kearsarge village. After that the ascent to Olympus is
easy.
On few mountains does one get the sense of exaltation and ecstatic
uplift that comes to him when he stands on the high summit of
Kearsarge. The mountain is splendidly isolated, only Bartlett rising
high near it, and the summit of that even being so far below as to be
readily overlooked. Northwestward looms Mount Washington, higher, no
doubt, but so buttressed by the great ranges on which it sits serene as
to lose the effect of upleap that Kearsarge has. Under you is spread
all eastern Maine, like a map, and you look northeastward across silver
levels of lakes and mottled green of dwarfed hills till, shadowy on
the far horizon, looms the peak of Katahdin, a blue land-cloud on
the rim of the silver-flecked green sea. The two peaks of Doublehead
are curious twin green knolls below to the north, and only in the
far-distant north and west are summits of height that equal or exceed
your own. Far away in these directions they begin and pinnacle and
retreat, range beyond range, till they fade into the dim blue haze of
the farthest horizon. Southeast lie one silver lake after another, till
the eye finds Sebago, and beyond that the thin rim of the world which
is Casco Bay and the sea.
Much cool water must well up from the heart of Kearsarge to its summit,
for grass grows long there in the hollows of the granite, and many
alders, hung with powdery curls of staminate bloom and green with
many leaves in mid-June. The moccasin flowers failed in their climb
from Bartlett summit to reach the top of Kearsarge, but the rhodora
has come up and set rose purple blooms in the same season, the leaves
here pushing out with the flowers instead of waiting, as they do in
lower latitudes, at lesser heights. Under their caresses the mountain
has smiled and given forth butterflies. Here are the white admirals,
conscious with epaulettes as if they had just stepped ashore from the
white cloud fleets that swing with cumulus sails piled high just off
shore. Here is the painted lady, hovering admiringly by, seemingly
unnoticed by the admirals. Here are tiger swallowtails, their gold
black-barred with rippling shadows, and little skippers, swift and busy
when the admirals heave in sight. Most of all I note mourning cloaks,
and one in particular is in deep mourning, the usual pale rim of his
wings replaced by a brown that is so deep it is black and hides all
azure spots that should be there. It may be that all these butterflies
sailed up into the island port of a mountain top that swims so high in
the vivid sunshine of the June afternoon that the air about it seems
to me, watching them, to be a veritable transparent blue sea of great
depth, yet it is just as likely that many were born on or near the
summit, of generations of mountain dwelling lepidoptera. Of these must
have been my black-bordered mourning cloak, the winter's cold having
dulled his color within the chrysalis and giving an added depth to his
mourning. He was as sombre as the dusky-wings which dashed about with
the skippers, like black slaves come to help in the lading of their
vessels.
* * * * *
Into this island port in the high air came, about four in the
afternoon, a wind from the sea, cooling the intense heat and spreading
a smoke-blue haze all along the southeastern horizon. It wiped out the
coast-line of Casco Bay and moved the sea in with it, swallowing Sebago
and pushing on till Lovell's Pond and the lesser ones within the New
Hampshire line became estuaries at which one looked long, expecting to
see slanting sails and smell the cool fragrance of tide-washed flats.
Into this haze loomed one after another the distant Maine mountains and
vanished as if slipping their cables and sailing away over the rim of
the world, bound for foreign ports. A new romance of mystery had come
to the outlook from the mountain top. Far up its side, borne on this
cool air, came the song of thrushes, a jubilation of satisfied longing.
The breath of the sea had come with cool reassurance to soothe and
hearten all things.
On beyond Kearsarge, toward Crawford Notch and the Presidential Range
swept this cool reviving air, carrying its blue haze with it. The low
sun sent broad bands of palest blue down through this vapor and with
it, northwestward, the mountains seemed to withdraw; details that had
been so clear vanished, and instead of dapple of purple-green forest
and rose-gray cliff were long cloud-ridges of wonderful deep blue
riding one beyond another like waves on a painted sea, the darkest
nearest, the farther paling into the farthest and that vanishing
into the blue of the sky itself. Out of Crawford Notch rolled the
Saco, flecking the valley below with patches of gleaming silver. The
cumulus cloud fleets that had swung over the mountains all day long,
bluing the green of the hills with the shadows of their canvas, swept
northwestward with this wind, a great convoy for the sun on into the
ports of the radiant west. Now one of them hid him from sight, its
edges all gold with the joy of it. Again the rays flashed clear and
the shadow of Kearsarge moved its point of blue a little farther out
on the green of the forest to eastward. Down the mountain path a
Bicknell's thrush sang, the veery's song, less round and loud and full,
but with much of the spiral, bell-tone quality in it. It reminded me
that the visitor to the summit who is to go home by way of the broad
path to Kearsarge village may well wait till this pointed shadow of
the summit climbs Pleasant Mountain in Maine and looms upward into the
purple shadows beyond. I was to go back by that coquette of a trail
down Bartlett, and the thought of what tricks it would play on me by
moonlight made me hasten.
The cool of evening was descending like a benediction on the level,
elm-fringed meadows of Intervale, and the little village of North
Conway gleamed white in the low sun and pointed the broad way down the
Saco Valley to a hundred lakes as I climbed over the brow of Bartlett
and clinked my heels on the ledges of its western face. The mocassin
flowers nodded good night and the golden green, spiked blooms of the
mountain moosewood waved me on down the path that seemed as true as
slender as it wound on down the hill. Surely, I thought, holding is
having, and I shall keep this little path close till the end of the
way. And then it slipped from under my arm and snickered as it made off
in the bushes, goodness knows where, leaving me two-thirds the way down
Bartlett with the dusk and the tangle of forest all before me. However,
"down hill goes merrily," and so did I, and by and by I came to a tiny
mountain brook, and we two jogged on together in the deepening gloom,
prattling of what we had seen.
At least, mountain brooks do not run away from you as mountain paths
do, but it is as well not to trust them too much, after dark. This one
led me demurely to the brink of the little precipice of "No-go" Falls
and chuckled as it took the thirty-foot leap, a slim thread of silver
in the moonlight. I dare say it was thinking what a fine splash I would
make in the shallow pool below. Instead I clambered carefully around
and made the foot of the little cliff without a thud, there to find
that the laugh is really on the brook, for its leap takes it into a
big iron funnel whence it is personally conducted down a mile more of
mountain into the little reservoir of the North Conway water supply. I
followed the pipe, too, but outside, and the brook did not gurgle once
about it all the way down.
V
RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS
_The Gods, Half-Gods and Pixies to be Seen as the Storm Passes_