the bare crags above the woods that the wonders of the ascent begin, and
the succession of views, dimly seen through my eyes in this chapter,
challenges the attention at every step. There is one exception. About
a mile up, the road issues upon a jutting spur of the mountain, from
which the summit, with the house on the highest point, is seen in clear
weather.
Suddenly I came out of the low firs, the scrubby growth of birches, upon
the fear-inspiring desolation of the bared and wintry summit. The high
sun poured down with dazzling brightness upon the white ledges, which,
rising like a wall above the solitary cabin before me, thrust their
jagged edges in the way, as if to forbid farther progress. Out of this
glittering precipice dead trees thrust huge antlers. This formless mass
overhanging the Half-Way House, known as The Ledge, is one of the most
terrific sights of the journey.
Until clear of the woods, my uneasiness, inspired by the recollection
of the ascent from Crawford's, was extreme; but I now stood, in the
full blaze of an unclouded sun, upon a treeless wilderness of rock, a
gratified spectator of one of the most extraordinary scenes it has ever
fallen to man's lot to witness. But what a frightful silence! Not a
murmur; not a rustling leaf; but all still as death. I was half-afraid.
At my feet yawned the measureless void of the Great Gulf, torn from the
entrails of the mountain by Titanic hands. Above my head leaped up the
endless pile of granite constituting the dome of Washington. It had now
exchanged its gray cassock for pale green. All around was unutterable
desolation. Crevassed with wide splits, encompassed round by lofty
mountain walls, the gorge was at once fascinating and forbidding, grand
yet terrible. The high-encircling steeps of Clay and Jefferson, Adams
and Madison, enclosing it with one mighty sweep, ascended out of its
depths and stretched along the sky, which seemed receding before their
daring advance. Peering down into the abyss, where the tallest pines
were shrubs and their trunks needles, the earth seemed split to its
centre, and the feet of these mountains rooted in the midst. To confront
such a spectacle unmoved one should be more, or less than human.
Looking backward over the forest through which I had come, the eye
caught a blur of white and a gleam of blue in the Peabody Glen. The
white was the hotel, the blue the river. Following the vale out to
its entrance upon the Androscoggin meadows, the same swift messenger
ascended Moriah, and, traversing the confederate peaks to the summit of
Mount Carter, stopped short at its journey's end.
As I slowly mounted the Ledge the same unnatural appearance was
everywhere--the same wreck, same desolation, same discord. The dead
cedars, bleaching all around, looked like an army of gigantic crabs
crawling up the mountain side, which universal ruin overspread, and
which even the soft sunshine rendered more ghastly and more solemn. I
looked eagerly along the road; listened. Not a human being; not a sound.
I was alone upon the mountain.
[Illustration: MOUNT ADAMS AND THE GREAT GULF.]
From here I no longer walked upon earth but on air. Respiration became
more and more difficult. Not even a zephyr stirred, while the glare
was painful to eyes already overtaxed in the endeavor to grasp the
full meaning of this most unaccustomed scene. The road, steadily
ascending, showed its zigzags far up the mountain. Now and then a rude
receptacle had been dug, or rather built up, by the road-side, in which
earth to mend the road was stored; and this soil, wholly composed of
disintegrated rock, must be scraped from underneath the ledges, from
crevices, from hollows, and husbanded with care. "As cheap as dirt,"
was a saying without significance here. As I neared the summit the
melting snows had, in many places, swept it bare, exposing the naked
ledge; and here earth must be brought up from lower down the mountain.
But the pains bestowed upon it equals the incessant demand for its
preservation, and had I not seen with my own eyes I could scarcely have
believed so excellent a specimen of road-making existed in this desert.
But how long will the mountain resist the denuding process constantly
going on, and what repair the gradual but certain disintegration of the
peak? It is a monument of human inability to act upon it in any way.
Be it so. The snows, the frosts, the rains, pursue their work none the
less surely. You see in the deep gullies, the avalanches of stones, the
sands of the sea-shore--so many evidences of the forces which, sooner or
later, will accomplish the miracle and remove the mountain.
From my next halting-place I perceived that I had been traversing a
promontory of the mountain jutting boldly out into the Great Gulf, above
the Half-Way House; and, looking down over the parapet-wall, a mile or
more of the road uncoiled its huge folds, turning hither and thither,
doubling upon itself like a bewildered serpent, and, like the serpent,
always gaining a little on the mountain. This is one of the strangest
sights of this strange journey; but, in order to appreciate it at its
full value, one should be descending by the stage-coach, when the
danger, more apparent than real, is intensified by the swift descent of
the mountain into the gulf below, over which the traveller sees himself
suspended with feelings more poignant than agreeable. The fact that
there has never been a fatal accident upon the carriage-road speaks
volumes for the caution and skill of the drivers; but, as one of the
oldest and most experienced said to me, "There should be no fooling, no
chaffing, and no drinking on that road."[21]
Continuing to ascend, the road once more took a different direction,
curving around that side of the mountain rising above the Pinkham
forest. This détour brought the Carter chain upon my left, instead of on
my right.
Thus far I had encountered little snow, though the rocks were everywhere
crusted with ice; but now a sudden turning brought me full upon an
enormous bank, completely blocking the road, which here skirted the
edge of a high precipice. Had a sentinel suddenly barred my way with
his bayonet, I could not have been more astonished. I was brought to a
dead stand. I looked over the parapet, then at the snow-bank, then at
the mountain. The first look made me shudder, the second thoughtful, the
third gave me a headache.
At this spot the side of the mountain was only a continuation of the
precipice, bent slightly backward from the perpendicular, and ascending
several hundred feet higher. The snow, extending a hundred feet or more
above, and conforming nearly with the slope of the mountain, filled the
road for thrice that distance. I saw that it was only prevented from
sliding into the valley by the low wall of loose stones at the edge of
the road; but how long would that resist the great pressure upon it? The
snow-bank had already melted at its edges, so that I could crawl some
distance underneath, and hear the drip of water above and below, showing
that it was being steadily undermined. In fact, the whole mass seemed on
the point of precipitating itself over the precipice. I could neither go
around it nor under it; so much was certain.
What to do? I had only a strong umbrella, the inseparable companion
of my mountain jaunts, and the glacier was as steep as a roof. What
assurance was there that if I ventured upon it the whole sheet,
dislodged by my weight, might not be shot off the mountain side,
carrying me with it to the bottom of the abyss? But while I felt no
desire to add mine to the catalogue of victims already claimed by the
mountain, the idea of being turned back was inadmissible. Native
caution put the question, "Will you?" and native persistency answered,
"I will."
When a thing is to be done, the best way is to do it. I therefore tried
the snow, and, finding a solid foothold, resolved to venture; had it
been soft, I should not have dared. Using my umbrella as an alpenstock,
I crossed on the parapet, where the declivity was the least, and without
accident, but slowly and breathlessly, until near the opposite side,
when I passed the intervening space in two bounds, alighting in the road
with the blood tingling to my fingers' ends.
A sharp turn around a ledge, and the south-east wall of Tuckerman's
Ravine rose up, like a wraith, out of the forest. Nearer at hand was the
head of Huntington's, while to the right the cone of Washington loomed
grandly more than a thousand feet higher. A little to the left you look
down into the gloomy depths of the Pinkham defile, the valley of Ellis
River, the Saco Valley to North Conway, where the familiar figure of
Kearsarge is the presiding genius. The blue course of the Ellis, which
is nothing but a long cascade, the rich green of the Conway intervales,
the blanched peak of Chocorua, the sapphire summits of the Ossipee
Mountains, were presented in conjunction with the black and humid walls
of the ravine, and the iron-gray mass of the great dome. The crag on
which I stood leans out over the mountain like a bastion, from which
the spectator sees the deep-intrenched valleys, the rivers which wash
the feet of the monarch, and the long line of summits which partake his
grandeur while making it all the more impressive.[22]
Turning now my back upon the Glen, the way led in the opposite
direction, and began to look over the depression between Clay and
Jefferson into the world of blue peaks beyond. From here the striking
spectacle of the four great northern peaks, their naked summits, their
sides seamed with old and new slides, and flecked with snow, constantly
enlarged. There were some terrible rents in the side of Clay, red as
half-closed wounds; in one place the mountain seemed cloven to its
centre. It was of this gulf that the first climber said it was such
a precipice he could scarce discern to the bottom. The rifts in the
walls of the ravine, the blasted fir-trees leaning over the abyss,
and clutching the rocks with a death-gripe, the rocks themselves,
tormented, formidable, impending, astound by their vivid portrayal of
the formless, their suggestions of the agony in which these mountains
were brought forth.
I was now fairly upon the broad, grass-grown terrace at the base of the
pinnacle, sometimes called the Cow Pasture. The low peak rising upon its
limits is a monument to the fatal temerity of a traveller who, having
climbed, as he supposed, to the top of the mountain, died from hunger
or exposure, or from both, at this inhospitable spot.[23] A skeleton in
rags was found, at the end of a year, huddled under some rocks. Farther
down the mountain a heap of stones indicates the place where Doctor
Ball, of Boston, was found by the party sent in search of him, famished,
exhausted, and almost delirious. When rescued, he had passed two nights
upon the mountain, without food, fire, or shelter, after as many days
of fruitless wandering up and down, always led astray by his want of
knowledge, and mocked by occasional glimpses of snowy peaks above, or
the distant Glen below. More dead than alive, he was supported down the
mountain as far as the camp at The Ledge, whence he was able to ride to
the Glen House. His reappearance had the effect of one risen from the
dead. In reality, the rescuing party took up with them materials for a
rude bier, expecting to find a dead body stiffening in the snow.[24]
Besides this almost unheard of resistance to hunger, cold, and
exhaustion combined, and notwithstanding the fortitude which enabled the
lost man to continue his desperate struggle for life until rescued, all
would doubtless have been to no purpose without the aid of an umbrella,
which, by a lucky chance, he took at setting out. This umbrella was
his only protection during the two terrible vigils he made upon the
mountain. How, is related in the chapter on the ascent from Crawford's.
Crossing the terrace, where even the road seems glad to rest after its
laborious climb of seven miles, and where the traveller may also relax
his efforts, preparatory to his arduous advance up the pinnacle, I came
upon the railway, still solidly embedded in snow and ice.
[Illustration: WINTER STORM ON THE SUMMIT.]
Still making a route for itself among massy blocks, tilted at every
conceivable angle, but forming, nevertheless, a symmetrical cone, the
carriage-road winds up the steep ascent, to which the railway is nailed.
While traversing the plateau, with the Summit House now in full view,
my eye caught, far above me, the figure of a man pacing up and down
before the building, like a sentinel on his post. I swung my hat in the
air; again; but he did not see me. Nevertheless, I experienced a thrill
of pleasure at seeing him, so acutely had the sense of loneliness come
over me in these awful solitudes. It put such vigor into my steps that
in half an hour I crossed the last rise, when the solitary pedestrian,
making an about-face at the end of his beat, suddenly discovered
a strange form and figure emerging from the rocks before him. He
stopped short, took the pipe from his teeth, looking with open-mouthed
astonishment, then, as I continued to approach, he hastened toward me,
met me half-way, and, between rapid questions and answers, led the way
into the signal station.
Behold me installed in the cupola of New England! While I was resting,
my host, a tall, bronzed, bearded man, bustled about the two or three
apartments constituting this swallow's nest. He put the kettle on the
stove, gave the fire a stir, spread a cloth upon the table, and took
some plates, cups, and saucers from a locker, some canned meats and
fruit from a cupboard, I, meanwhile, following all these movements with
an interest easily imagined. His preparations completed, my host first
ran his eye over them approvingly, then, presenting a pen, requested me
to inscribe my name in the visitors' book. I did so, noticing that the
last entry was in October--that is, five months had elapsed since the
last climber wended his solitary way down the mountain. My hospitable
entertainer then, with perfect politeness, begged me to draw my chair to
the table and fall to. I did not refuse. While he poured out the tea, I
asked,
"Whom have I the pleasure of addressing?" and he modestly replied,
"Private Doyle, sir, of the United States Signal Service. Have another
bit of devilled ham? No? Try these peaches."
"Thank you. At least Uncle Sam renders your exile tolerable. Is this
your ordinary fare?"
"Oh, as to that, you should see us in the dead of winter, chopping our
frozen meat with a hatchet, and our lard with a chisel."
This, then, was what my young Jehu had meant. Where was I? I glanced
out of the window. Nothing but sky, nothing but rocks; immensity and
desolation. I disposed my ideas to hear my companion ask, "What is the
news from the other world?"
VIII.
_MOUNT WASHINGTON._
The soldiers from the mountain Theches ran from rear to front,
breaking their ranks, crowding tumultuously upon each other,
laughing and shouting, "The sea! the sea!"--XENOPHON'S
_Anabasis_.
After the repast we walked out, Private Doyle and I, upon the narrow
platform behind the house. According to every appearance I had reached
_Ultima Thule_.
For some moments--moments not to be forgotten--we stood there silent.
Neither stirred. The scene was too tremendous to be grasped in an
instant. A moment was needed to recover one's moral equipoise, as well
as for the unpractised eye to adjust itself to the vastness of the
landscape, and to the multitude of objects, strange objects, everywhere
confronting it. My own sensations were at first too vague for analysis,
too tumultuous for expression. The flood choked itself.
All seemed chaos. On every side the great mountains fell away like
mists of the morning, dispersing, receding to an endless distance,
diminishing, growing more and more vague, and finally vanishing on
a limitless horizon neither earth nor sky. Never before had such a
spectacle offered itself to my gaze. The first idea was of standing on
the threshold of another planet, and of looking down upon this world of
ours outspread beneath; the second, of being face to face with eternity
itself. No one ever felt exhilaration at first. The scene is too
solemnizing.
But by degrees order came out of this chaos. The bewildering throng of
mountains arranged itself in chains, clusters, or families. Hills drew
apart, valleys opened, streams twinkled in the sun, towns and villages
clung to the skirts of the mountains or dotted the rich meadows; but all
was mysterious, all as yet unreal.
Comprehending at last that all New England was under my feet, I began
to search out certain landmarks. But this investigation is fatiguing:
besides, it conducts to nothing--absolutely nothing. Pointing to
a scrap of blue haze in the west, my companion observed, "That is
Mount Mansfield;" and I, mechanically, repeated, "Ah! that is Mount
Mansfield." It was nothing. Distance and Infinity have no more relation
than Time and Eternity. It sufficed for me, God knows, to be admitted
near the person of the great autocrat of New England, while under skies
so fair and radiant he gave audience to his imposing and splendid
retinue of mountains.
But still, independent of the will, the eye flitted from peak to
peak, from summit to summit, making the slow circuit of this immense
horizon, hovering at last over a band of white gleaming far away in the
south-east like a luminous cloud, on whose surface objects like birds
reposed. It was the sea, and the specks ships sailing on the main.
With the aid of a telescope we could even tell what sails the vessels
carried. In these few seconds the eye had put a girdle of six hundred
miles about.[25]
I consider this first introduction to what the peak of Mount Washington
looks down upon an epoch in any man's life. I saw the whole noble
company of mountains from highest to lowest. I saw the deep depressions
through which the Connecticut, the Merrimac, the Saco, the Androscoggin,
wind toward the lowlands. I saw the lakes which nurse the infant
tributaries of those streams. I saw the great northern forests, the
notched wall of the Green Mountains, the wide expanse of level land,
flat and heavy like the ocean, and finally the ocean itself. And all
this was mingled in one mighty scene.
The utmost that I can say of this view is that it is a marvel. You
receive an impression of the illimitable such as no other natural
spectacle--no, not even the sea--can give. Astonishment can go no
farther. Nevertheless, the truth is that you are on too high a
view-point for the most effective grasp of mountain scenery. This
immense height renders near objects indistinct, obscures the more
distant. Seldom, indeed, is the land seen, even under favoring
conditions, except through a soft haze, which, you are surprised to
notice, becomes more and more transparent as you descend. The eye
explores this _clair-obscur_, and gradually discerns this or that
object. It is true that you see to a great distance, but you do not
distinguish anything clearly. This is the rule, derived from many
observations, to which the crystal air of autumn and winter makes the
rare and fortunate exception.
There is a more cogent reason why the view from Mount Washington is
inferior to that from other and lower summits. Everything is below
you, and, naturally, therefore, any picture of these mountains not
showing the cloud-capped dome of the monarch, attended by his cortége
of grand peaks--the central, dominating, perfecting group--must be
essentially incomplete. Imagine Rome without St. Peter's, or, to come
nearer home, Boston without her State House! One word more: from this
lofty height you lose the symmetrical relation of the lesser summits to
the grand whole. Even these signal embodiments of heroic strength--the
peaks of Jefferson, Adams, and Madison--so vigorously self-asserting
that what they lose in stature they gain by a powerful individuality,
even these suffer a partial eclipse; but the summits stretching to
the southward are so dwarfed as to be divested of any character as
typical mountain structures. What fascinates us is the "sublime chaos
of trenchant crests, of peaks shooting upward;" and the charm of the
view--such at least is the writer's conviction--resides rather in the
immediate surroundings than in the extent of the panorama, great as that
unquestionably is.
One thing struck me with great force--the enormous mass of the mountain.
The more you realize that the dependent peaks, stretching eight miles
north, and as many south, are nothing but buttresses, the more this
prodigious weight amazes. Two long spurs, divided by the valley of the
Rocky Branch, also descend into the Saco Valley as far as Bartlett; and
another, shorter, but of the same indestructible masonry, is traced
between the valleys of the Ammonoosuc and of Israel's River. In a word,
as the valleys lie and the roads run, we must travel sixty or seventy
miles around in order to make the circuit of Mount Washington at its
base.
Even here one is not satisfied if he sees a stone ever so little above
him.[26] The best posts for an outlook, after the signal station, are
upon a point of rocks behind the old Tip-Top House, and from the end
of the hotel platform, where the railway begins its terrifying descent.
From all these situations the view was large and satisfying. From the
first station one overlooks the southern summits; from the second, the
northern. A movement of the head discloses, in turn, the ocean, the
lakes and lowlands of Maine and New Hampshire, the broad highlands
of Massachusetts, the fading forms of Monadnock and Wachusett, the
highest peaks of Vermont and New York, and, finally, the great Canadian
wilderness.
After all this, the eye dwells upon the hideous waste of rock
blackened by ages of exposure, corroded with a green incrustation,
like _verd-antique_, constituting the dome. It is at once mournful and
appalling. Time has dealt the mountain some crushing blows, as we see by
these ghastly ruins, bearing silent testimony to their own great age. It
is necessary to step with care, for the rocks are sharp-edged. The green
appearance is due to lichens which bespatter them. Greedy little spiders
inhabit them. Truly this is a spot disinherited by Nature.
Noticing many boards scattered helter-skelter about the top and sides of
the mountain, I drew my companion's attention to them, and he explained
that what I saw was the result of the great January gale, which had
blown down the shed used as an engine-house, demolished every vestige of
the walk leading from the hotel to the signal station, and distributed
the fragments as if they had been straws far and wide, as I saw them.
The same gale had swept the coast from Hatteras to Canso with
destructive fury. I begged Private Doyle to give me his recollections of
it. We returned to the station, and he began as follows:
"At the time of the tornado I was sick, and my comrade, Sergeant M----,
who is now absent on leave, had to do my turn as well as his own. 'Uncle
Sam,' you know, keeps two of us here, for fear of accidents."[27]
"It surprised me to find you here alone," I assented.
"This is the third day." Then, resuming his narrative, "During the
forenoon preceding the gale we observed nothing very unusual; but the
clouds kept sinking and sinking, until, in the afternoon, the summit
alone was above them. For miles around nothing could be seen but one
vast ocean of frozen vapor, with peaks sticking out here and there,
like icebergs floating in this ocean--all being cased in snow and ice.
I cannot tell you how curious this was. Later in the day the density of
the clouds became such that they reflected the colors of the spectrum:
and that too was beautiful beyond description. It was about this time
Sergeant M---- came to where I was lying, and said, 'There is going to
be the devil to pay; so I guess I'll make everything snug.'
"By nine in the evening the wind had increased to one hundred miles an
hour, with heavy sleet, so that no observation could be safely made
from without. At midnight the velocity of the storm was one hundred and
twenty miles, and the exposed thermometer recorded 24° below zero. We
could hardly get it above freezing inside the house. With the stove red,
water froze within three feet of the fire; in fact, where you are now
sitting.