the opposite bank. Here we poured the water from our shoes, and resumed
our wet clothing. Everything was cooled, except our ardor.
As we approached nearer, the ledges were full of grim recesses, rude
rock-niches, and traversed by perpendicular cracks from brow to base.
"Take care!" I shouted; "there is a huge piece of the cliff just ready
to fall."
In some places the rock is sheer and smooth, in others it is broken
regularly down, for half its whole height, to where it is joined by rude
buttresses of massive granite. The lithe maples climb up the steepest
ravines, but cannot pass the waste of sheer rock stretching between
them and the firs, which look down over the brink of the precipice.
Rusted purple is the prevailing color, blotched here and there with
white, like the drip oozing from limestone. We soon emerged on the shore
of Echo Lake.
Hovering under the great precipices, which lie heavily shadowed on its
glossy surface, are gathered the waters flowing from the airy heights
above--the little rills, the rivulets, the cascades. The tremendous
shadow the cliff flings down seems lying deep in the bosom of the lake,
as if perpetually imprinted there. Slender birches, brilliant foliage,
were daintily etched upon the surface, like arabesques on polished
steel. The water is perfectly transparent, and without a ripple. Indeed,
the breezes playing around the summit, or humming in the tree-tops, seem
forbidden to enter this haunt of Dryads. The lake laps the yellow strand
with a light, fluttering movement. The place seems dedicated to silence
itself.
[Illustration: ECHO LAKE, NORTH CONWAY.]
To destroy this illusion, a man came out of a booth and touched off a
small cannon. The effect was like knocking at half a dozen doors at
once. And the silence which followed seemed all the deeper. Then the
aged rock was pelted with questions, and made to jeer, laugh, menace,
or curse by turns, or all at once. How grandly it bore all these petty
insolences! How presumptuous in us thus to cover its hoary front with
obloquy! We could never get the last word. We did not even come off in
triumph. How ironically the mountain repeated, "Who are you?" and "What
am I!" With what energy it at last vociferated, "Go to the devil!" To
the Devil's Den we accordingly go.
Following a woodland path skirting the base of the cliffs, we were
very soon before the entrance of the Devil's Den, formed by a huge
piece of the cliff falling upon other detached fragments in such a way
as to leave an aperture large enough to admit fifty persons at once. A
ponderous mass divides the cavern into two chambers, one of which is
light, airy, and spacious, the other dark, gloomy, and contracted--a
mere hole. This might well have been the lair of the bears and panthers
formerly roaming, unmolested, these woods.
The Cathedral is a recess higher up in the same cliff, hollowed out
by the cleaving off of the lower rock, leaving the upper portion of
the precipice overhanging. The top of the roof is as high as a tall
tree. Some maples that have grown here since the outer portion of the
rock fell, assist, with their straight-limbed, columnar trunks, the
resemblance to a chancel. A little way off this cavity has really the
appearance of a gigantic shell, like those fossils seen imbedded in
subterranean rocks. We did not miss here the delicious glimpses of
Kearsarge, and of the mountains across the valley which, now that the
sun came out, were all in brilliant light, while the cool afternoon
shadows already wrapped the woods about us in twilight gloom.
Still farther on we came upon a fine cascade falling down a long,
irregular staircase of broken rock. One of these steps extends, a solid
mass of granite, more than a hundred feet across the bed of the stream,
and is twenty feet high. Unless the brook is full, it is not a single
sheet we see, but twenty, fifty crystal streams gushing or spirting
from the grooves they have channelled in the hard granite, and falling
into basins they have hollowed out. It is these curious, circular stone
cavities, out of which the freshest and cleanest water constantly pours,
that give to the cascade the name of Diana's Baths. The water never
dashes itself noisily down, but slips, like oil, from the rocks, with a
pleasant, purling sound no single word of our language will correctly
describe. From here we returned to the village in the same way that we
came.[4]
The wild and bristling little mountain range on the east side of North
Conway embodies a good deal of picturesque character. It is there our
way lies to Artists' Falls, which are on a brook issuing from these
Green Hills. I found the walk, following its windings, more remunerative
than the falls themselves. The brook, flowing first over a smooth
granite ledge, collects in a little pool below, out of which the pure
water filters through bowlders and among glittering pebbles to a gorge
between two rocks, down which it plunges. The beauty of this cascade
consists in its waywardness. Now it is a thin sheet, flowing demurely
along; now it breaks out in uncontrollable antics; and at length, as if
tired of this sport, darts like an arrow down the rocky fissure, and is
a mountain brook again.
The ascent of Kearsarge and of the Moats fittingly crowns the series of
excursions which are the most attractive feature of out-of-door life
at North Conway. The northern peak of Moat is the one most frequently
climbed, but the southern affords almost equally admirable views of the
Saco, the Ellis, and the Swift River valleys, with the mountain chains
enclosing them. The prospect here is, however, much the same as that
obtained from Chocorua, which is seen rising beyond the Swift River
valley. To that description I must, therefore, refer the reader, who is
already acquainted with its principal features.
The high ridge is an arid and desolate heap of summits stripped bare
of vegetation by fire. When this fire occurred, twenty odd years
ago, it drove the bears and rattlesnakes from their forest homes in
great numbers, so that they fell an easy prey to their destroyers. A
depression near its centre divides the ridge in two, constituting, in
effect, two mountains. We crossed the range in its whole length, and,
after newly refreshing ourselves with the admirable views had from
its greater elevation, descended the northern peak to Diana's Baths.
Probably the most striking view of the Moats is from Conway. Here the
summits, thrown into a mass of lawless curves and blunted, prong-like
protuberances, rear a blackened and weird-looking cluster on high. But
for a wide region they divide with Chocorua the honors of the landscape,
constituting, at Jackson especially, a large and imposing background,
massively based and buttressed, and cutting through space with their
trenchant edge.
In the winter of 1876, finding myself at North Conway, I determined to
make the attempt to ascend Mount Kearsarge, notwithstanding two-thirds
of the mountain were shrouded in snow, and the bare shaft constituting
the spire sheathed in glittering ice. The mountain had definitively gone
into winter-quarters.
I was up early enough to surprise, all at once, the unwonted and
curiously-blended effect of moonlight, starlight, and the twilight of
dawn. The new moon, with the old in her arms, balanced her shining
crescent on the curved peak of Moat Mountain. All these high,
surrounding peaks, carved in marble and flooded with effulgence,
impressed the spirit with that mingled awe and devotion felt among
the antique monuments of some vast cemetery. The sight thrilled and
solemnized by its chaste magnificence. Glittering stars, snow-draped
summits, black mountains casting sable draperies upon the dead white
of the valley, constituted a scene of sepulchral pomp into which the
supernatural entered unchallenged. One by one the stars went out. The
moon grew pale. A clear emerald, overspreading the east, was reflected
from lofty peak and tapering spire.
[Illustration: KEARSARGE IN WINTER.]
Day broke bright, clear, and crisp. There, again, was the same matchless
array of high and noble summits, sitting on thrones of alabaster
whiteness. While the moon still lingered in the west, the broad red
disk of the sun rose over the wooded ridges in the east. So sun and
moon, monarch and queen, saluted each other. One gave the watchword,
and descended behind the moated mountain; the other ascended the vacant
throne. Thus night and day met and exchanged majestic salutation in the
courts of the morning.
The mercury stood at three degrees below zero in the village, when I
set out on foot for the mountain. A light fall of snow had renewed
the Christmas decorations. The trees had newly-leaved and blossomed.
Beautiful it was to see the dark old pines thick-flaked with new snow,
and the same feathery substance lodged on every twig and branchlet,
tangle of vines, or tuft of tawny yellow grass. Fir-trees looked like
gigantic azaleas; thickets like coral groves. Nothing too slender or too
fragile for the white flight to alight upon. Talk of decorative art!
Even the telegraph-wires hung in broad, graceful festoons of white,
and the poor washer-woman's clothes-line was changed into the same
immaterial thing of beauty.
The ascent proved more toilsome than I had anticipated, as my feet
broke through the frozen crust at every step. But if the climb had been
difficult when in the woods, it certainly presented few attractions when
I emerged from them half a mile below the summit. I found the surface of
the bare ledges, which now continue to the top of the mountain, sheeted
in ice, smooth and slippery as glass.
Many a time have I laughed heartily at the feverish indecision of a dog
when he runs along the margin of a pond into which he has been urged
to plunge. He turns this way and that, whines, barks, crouches for the
leap, laps the water, but hesitates. Imagine, now, the same animal
chasing some object upon slippery ice, his feet spread widely apart;
his frantic efforts to stop; the circles described in the air by his
tail. Well, I experienced the same perplexity, and made nearly the same
ridiculous evolutions.
After several futile attempts to advance over it, and as often finding
myself sliding backward with entire loss of control of my own movements,
I tried the rugged ravine, traversing the summit, with some success,
steadying my steps on the iced bowlders by grasping the bushes which
grew there among clefts of the rock. But this way, besides being
extremely fatiguing, was decidedly the more dangerous of the two; and
I was glad, after a brief trial, to abandon it for the ice, in which,
here and there, detached stones, solidly embedded, furnished points of
support, if they could be reached. By pursuing a zigzag course from
stone to stone, sometimes--like a pious Moslem approaching the tomb of
the Prophet--upon my hands and knees, and shedding tears from the force
of the wind, I succeeded in getting over the ledges after an hour's
obstinate battle to maintain an upright position, and after several
mishaps had taught me a degree of caution closely approaching timidity.
By far the most treacherous ground was where fresh snow, covering the
smooth ice, spread its pitfalls in the path, causing me several times
to measure my length; but at last these obstacles were one by one
surmounted; I groped my way, foot by foot, up the sharp rise of the
pinnacle, finding myself at the front door of the house which is so
conspicuous an object from the valley.
Never was air more pure, more crisp, or more transparent. Besides,
what air can rival that of winter? I felt myself rather floating than
walking. Certainly there is a lightness, a clearness, and a depth that
belongs to no other season. At no other season do we behold our native
skies so blue, so firm, or so brilliant as when the limpid ether,
winnowed by the fierce north wind to absolute purity, presents objects
with such marvellous clearness, precision, and fidelity, that we hardly
persuade ourselves they are forty, fifty, or a hundred miles distant. To
realize this rare condition was all the object of the ascent--an object
attained in a measure far beyond any anticipations I had formed.
As may easily be imagined, the immediate effect was bewildering in the
extreme. In the first place, the direct rays of the noonday sun covered
the mountain-top with dazzling brilliancy. The eye fairly ached with
looking at it. In the second, the intensity of the blue was such as to
give the idea that the grand expanse of sky was hard frozen. Nothing
more coldly brilliant than this immense azure dome can be conceived.
There was not the faintest trace of a cloud anywhere; nothing but this
splendid void. Under this high-vaulted dome, imagine now a vast expanse
of white etched with brown--a landscape in sepia. Such was the general
effect.
But the inexpressible delight of having all this admirable scene to
one's self! Taine asks, "Can anything be sweeter than the certainty
of being alone? In any widely known spot, you are in constant dread
of an incursion of tourists; the hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced
admiration, the bustle, whether of unfastening horses, or of unpacking
provisions, or of airing opinions, all disturb the budding sensation;
civilization recovers its hold upon you. But here, what security and
what silence! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it
has been these six thousand years."
The view from this mountain is justly admired. Stripped of life and
color, I found it sad, pathetic even. Dead white and steel blue rudely
repulsed the sensitive eye. The north wind, cold and cutting, drove me
to take shelter under glaring rocks. The cracking of ice first on one
side, then on the other, diverted the attention from the landscape,
as if the mountain was continually snapping its fingers in disdain.
I had constantly the feeling that some _one_ or some _thing_ was at
my elbow. What childishness! But where now was the lavish summer, the
barbaric splendors of autumn--its arabesques of foliage, its velvet
shadows, its dappled skies, its glow, mantling like that of health and
beauty? All-pervading gloom and defoliation were rendered ten times more
melancholy by the splendid glare. Winter flung her white shroud over the
land to hide the repulsiveness of death.
I looked across the valley where Moat Mountain reared its magnificent
dark wave. Passing to the north side, the eye wandered over the wooded
summits to the silvery heap of Washington, to which frozen, rose-colored
mists were clinging. A great ice-cataract rolled down over the edge
of Tuckerman's Ravine, its wave of glittering emerald. It shone with
enchanting brilliancy, cheating the imagination with the idea that
it moved; that the thin, spectral vapor rose from the depths of the
ice-cold gorge below. There gaped, wide open, the enormous hole of
Carter Notch; there the pale-blue Saco wound in and out of the hills,
with hamlets and villages strung along its serpentine course; and, as
the river grows, villages increase to towns, towns to cities. There
was the sea sparkling like a plain of quicksilver, with ponds and
lakes innumerable between. There, in the south-west, as far as the eye
could reach, was Monadnock demanding recognition; and in the west,
Moosehillock, Lafayette, Carrigain peaks, lifted with calm superiority
above the chaos of mountains, like higher waves of a frozen sea.
Finally, there were the snow-capped summits of the great range seen
throughout their whole extent, sunning their satin sides in indolent
enjoyment.
This view has no peer in these mountains. Indeed, the mountain seems
expressly placed to command in one comprehensive sweep of the eye the
most impressive features of any mountain landscape. Being a peak of the
second order--that is to say, one not dominating all the chains--while
it does not unfold the topography of the region in its whole extent,
it is sufficiently elevated to permit the spectator to enjoy that
increasing grandeur with which the distant ranges rise, tier upon tier,
to their great central spires, without lessening materially their
loftiness, or the peculiar and varied expression of their contours. The
peak of Kearsarge peeps down over one shoulder into New Hampshire, over
the other into Maine. It looks straight up through the open door of the
Carter Notch, and boldly stares Washington in the face. It sees the
sun rise from the ocean, and set behind Mount Lafayette. It patronizes
Moat, measures itself proudly with Chocorua, and maintains a distant
acquaintance with Monadnock. It is a handsome mountain, and, as such,
is a general favorite with the ladies and the artists. Like a careful
shepherd, it every morning scans the valleys to see that none of its
flock of villages has wandered. For these villagers it is a sun-dial, a
weather-vane, an almanac; for the wayfarer, a sure guide; and for the
poet, a mountain with a soul.
[Illustration: SLIDING DOWN KEARSARGE.]
The cold was intense, the wind piercing. On its north side the house
was deeply incrusted with ice-spars--windows and all. I feel that only
scant justice can be done to their wondrous beauty. All the scrubby
bushes growing out of interstices of the crumbling summit--wee twig
and slender filament--were stemmed with ice; while the rocks bristled
with countless frost feathers. With my pitch-cakes and a few twigs
I lighted a fire, which might be seen from the half-dozen villages
clustered about the foot of the mountain, and pleased myself with
imagining the astonishment with which a smoke curling upward from
this peak would be greeted for fifty miles around. I then prepared to
descend--I say prepared to descend, for the thing at once so easy to
say and so difficult of performance suddenly revived the recollection
of the hazardous scramble up the ledges, and made it seem child's play
by comparison. For a brief hour I had forgotten all this. However, go
down I must. But how? The first step on the ice threatened a descent
more rapid than flesh and blood could calmly contemplate. I had no
hatchet to cut steps in the ice; no rope to attach to the rocks, and
thus lower myself, as is practised in crossing the glaciers of the
Alps; and there was no foothold. For a moment I seriously thought of
forcing an entrance into the house, and, making a signal of distress,
resign myself to the possibility of help from below. But while sitting
on a rock looking blankly at the glassy declivity stretching down from
the summit, a bright idea came to my aid. I remembered having read in
Bourrienne's "Memoirs" that Bonaparte--the great Bonaparte--was forced
to slide down the summit of the Great St. Bernard _seated_, while
making his famous passage of the Alps. Yes, the great Corsican really
advanced to the conquest of Italy in this undignified posture. But never
did great example find more unworthy imitator. Seating myself, as the
Little Corporal had done, using my staff as a rudder, and steering for
protruding stones in order to check the force of the descent from time
to time, I slid down with a celerity the very remembrance of which makes
my head swim, arriving safe, but breathless and much astonished, at
the first irregular patch of snow. The pleasure of standing erect on
something the feet could grasp was one not to be translated into words.
Upon reaching the hotel, I procured another pair of pantaloons of my
host, and some court-plaster from the village apothecary. If any of my
readers think my dignity compromised, I beg him to remember the example
of the great Napoleon, and his famous expedient for circumventing the
Great St. Bernard.
VI.
_FROM KEARSARGE TO CARRIGAIN._
_Raleigh._--"Fain would I climb, but that I fear to fall."
_Queen Elizabeth._--"If thy heart fail thee, climb thou not at all."
After the storm, we had a fine lunar bow. The corona in the centre was a
clear silver, the outer circle composed of pale green and orange fires.
Over the moon's disk clouds swept a continuous stormy flight. The great
planet resembled a splendid decoration hung high in the heavens.
Having now progressed to terms of easy familiarity with the village, it
was decided to pay our respects to the Intervale, which unites it with
the neighboring town of Bartlett.
The road up the valley first skirts a wood, and through this wood are
delicious glimpses of Mount Adams. During the heat of the day or cool
of the evening this extensive and beautiful forest has always been a
favorite haunt. Tall, athletic pines, that bend in the breeze like
whalebone, lift their immense clusters of impenetrable foliage on high.
The sighs of lovers are softly echoed in their green tops; voices and
laughter issue from it. We, too, will swing our hammock here, and
breathe the healing fragrance that is so grateful.
In a little enclosure of rough stone, on the Bigelow place, lie the
remains of the ill-fated Willey family, who were destroyed by the
memorable slide of 1826. The inscription closes with this not too lucid
figure:
"We gaze around, we read their monument;
We sigh, and when we sigh we sink."
Where the high terrace, making one grand sweep to the right, again
unveils the same superb view of the great summits, now wholly
unobstructed by houses or groves, we halt before that picture,
unrivalled in these mountains, not surpassed, perhaps, upon earth, and
which we never tire of gazing upon. Its most salient features have
already been described; but here in their very midst, from their very
heart, nature seems to have snatched a garden-spot from the haggard
mountains arrested in their advance by the command, "Thus far, and no
farther!" The elms, all grace, all refinement of form, bend before
the fierce blasts of winter, but stir not. The frozen east wind flies
shrieking through, as if to tear them limb from limb. The ground is
littered with their branches. They bow meekly before its rage, but stir
not. Really, they seem so many sentinels jealously guarding that repose
of which the vale is so eloquently the expression. The vale regards the
stormy summits around with the unconcern of perfect security. It is rest
to look at it.
[Illustration: CONWAY MEADOWS.]
Again we scan the great peaks which in clear days come boldly down and
stand at our very doors, but on hazy ones remove to a vast distance,
keeping vaguely aloof day in and day out. Sometimes they are in the
sulks, sometimes bold and forward. By turns they are graciously
condescending, or tantalizingly incomprehensible. One time they muffle
themselves in clouds from head to foot, so we cannot detect a suggestive
line or a contour; another, throwing off all disguise, they expose their
most secret beauties to the free gaze of the multitude. This is to set
the beholder's blood on fire with the passion to climb as high as those
gray shafts of everlasting rock that so proudly survey the creeping
leagues beneath them.
Nowhere is the unapproachable grandeur of Mount Washington more fully
manifested than here. This large and impressive view is at once
suggestive of that glorious pre-eminence always associated with high
mountains. There are mountains, respectable ones too, in the middle
distance; but over these the great peak lords it with undisputed sway.
The bold and firm, though gradual, lines of ascent culminating at the
apex, extend over leagues of sky. After a clear sunset, Mount Washington
takes the same dull lead-color of the clouds hovering like enormous
night-birds over its head.