undisguised preference for the smoke and dirt of London, the mountains
awoke something in these two men which was apparently a revelation of
themselves unto themselves. I have felt a higher respect for both since
I knew that they loved mountains, as I pity those who have only seen
heaven through the smoke of the city. It is not easy to explain two
ideas so essentially opposite as are presented in the earlier and later
declarations of these widely famous authors, unless we agree, keeping
"Elia's" odd simile in mind, that in the first case they should, like
woman, be taken, not at what she says, but what she means.
The Flume House is the proper tarrying-place for an investigation of the
mountain gorge from which it derives both its custom and its name. It
is also placed opposite to the Pool, another of those natural wonders
with which the pass is crowded, and which tempt us at every step to turn
aside from the travelled road.
Fronting the hotel is a belt of woods, with two massive mountains
rising behind. In the concealment of these woods the Pemigewasset,
contracted to a modest stream, runs along the foot of the mountains.
A rough, zigzag path leads through the woods to the river and to the
Pool. Now raise the eyes to the summit-ridge of yonder mountain. The
peak finely reproduces the features of a gigantic human face, while
the undulations of the ridge fairly suggest a recumbent human figure
wrapped in a shroud. The outlines of the forehead and nose are curiously
like the profile of Washington; hence the colossal figure is called
Washington Lying in State. This immortal sculpture gave rise to the idea
that the tomb of Washington, like that of Desaix, on the St. Bernard,
should be on the great summit that bears his name.
[Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF THE POOL.]
From the Flume House I looked up through the deep cleft of the Notch--an
impressive vista. To the left is Cannon, or Profile Mountain; to the
right the beetling crags of Eagle Cliff; then the pointed, shapely peaks
of Lafayette; and so the range continues breaking off and off, bending
away into lesser mountains that finally melt into pale-blue shadows.
Now a stray cloud atop a peak gives it a volcanic character. Now a puff
scatters it like thistle-down. It is a sultry summer's morning, and
banks of film hang like huge spider's-webs in the tree-tops. Soon they
detach themselves, and, floating lazily upward, are seized by a truant
breeze, spun mischievously round, and then settle quietly down on the
highest peaks like young eaglets on their nest.
Let us first walk down to the Pool. This Pool is a caprice of the river.
Imagine a cistern, deeply sunk in granite, receiving at one end a weary
cascade, which seems to crave a moment's rest before hurrying on down
the rocky pass. In the mystery and seclusion of ages, and with only the
rude implements picked up by the way, the river has hollowed a basin
a hundred feet wide and forty deep out of the stubborn rock. Without
doubt Nature thus first taught us to cut the hardest marble with sand
and water. Cliffs traversed by cracks rise a hundred feet higher.
The water is a glossy and lustrous sea-green, and of such marvellous
transparency that you see the brilliant pebbles sparkling at the bottom,
shifting with the waves of light like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.
Overtopping trees lean timidly over and peer down into the Pool, which
coldly repulses their shadows. Only the colorless hue of the rocks
is reflected; and the stranger, seeing an old man with a gray beard
standing erect in a boat, has no other idea than that he has arrived on
the borders and is to be accosted by the ferryman of Hades.
The Flume is reached by going down the road a short distance, and then
diverging to the left and crossing the river to the Flume Brook. A
carriage-way conducts almost to the entrance of the gorge. Then begins
an easy and interesting promenade up the bed of the brook.
This is a remarkable rock-gallery, driven several hundred feet into
the heart of the mountain, through which an ice-cold brook rushes. The
miracle of Moses seems repeated here sublimely. Some unknown power smote
the rock, and the prisoned stream gushed forth free and lightsome as
air. You approach it over broad ledges of freckled granite, polished
by the constant flow of a thin, pellucid sheet of water to slippery
smoothness. Proceeding a short distance up this natural esplanade, you
enter a damp and gloomy fissure between perpendicular walls, rising
seventy feet above the stream, and, on lifting your eyes suddenly,
espy an enormous bowlder tightly wedged between the cliffs. Now try to
imagine a force capable of grasping the solid rock and dividing it in
halves as easily as you would an apple with your two hands.
[Illustration: THE FLUME, FRANCONIA NOTCH.]
At sight of the suspended bowlder, which seems, like Paul Pry, to have
"just dropped in," I believe every visitor has his moment of hesitation,
which he usually ends by passing underneath, paying as he goes with a
tremor of the nerves, more or less, for his temerity. But there is no
danger. It is seen that the deep crevice, into which the rock seems
jammed with the especial purpose of holding it asunder, also hugs the
intruder like a vise; so closely, indeed, that, according to every
appearance, it must stay where it is until doomsday, unless released by
some passing earthquake from its imprisonment. Sentimental tourists do
not omit to find a moral in this curiosity, which really looks to be on
the eve of dropping, with a loud splash, into the torrent beneath. On
top of the cliffs I picked up a visiting-card, on which some one with
a poetic turn had written, "Does not this bowlder remind you of the
sword of Damocles?" To a civil question, civil reply: No; to me it looks
like a nut in a cracker.
Over the gorge bends an arcade of interlaced foliage shot through and
through with sunshine; and wherever cleft or cranny can be found young
birches, sword-ferns, trailing vines, insinuating their long roots in
the damp mould, garland the cold granite with tenderest green. The
exquisite white anemone blooms in the mossy wall wet with tiny streams
that do not run but glide unperceived down. What could be more cunning
than the persistency with which these hardy waifs, clinging or drooping
along the craggy way, draw their sustenance from the rock, which seems
to nourish them in spite of itself? Underneath your feet the swollen
torrent storms along the gorge, dashing itself recklessly against
intruding bowlders, or else passing them with a curl of disdain. How
gallantly it surmounts every obstacle in its way! How crystal-clear are
its waters! On it speeds, scattering pearls and diamonds right and left,
like the prodigal it is; unpolluted, as yet, by the filth of cities, or
turned into a languid, broken-spirited drudge by dams or mill-wheels.
"Stop me?" it seems exclaiming. "Why, I am offspring of the clouds,
their messenger to the parched earth, the mountain maid-of-all-work!
Stay; step aside here in the sun and I will show you my rainbow-signet!
When I rest, do you not behold the mother imaged in the features of the
child? Stop me! Put your hand in my bosom and see how strong and full
of life are my pulse-beats. To-morrow I shall be vapor. Thought is not
freer. I do not belong to earth any more than the eagle sailing above
yonder mountain-top."
Overhead a fallen tree-trunk makes a crazy bridge from cliff to cliff.
The sight of the gorge, with the flood foaming far below, the glitter
of falling waters through the trees, the splendid light in the midst of
deepest gloom, the solemn pines--the odorous forest, the wildness and
the coolness--impart an indescribable charm to the spot that makes us
reluctant to leave it. Many ladies ascend to the head of the gorge and,
crossing on the rude bridge, leave their visiting-cards on the other
side; one had left her pocket-handkerchief, with the scent fresh upon
it. I picked it up, and out hopped a toad.
After the Pool and the Flume, an ascent of the mountain behind the hotel
will be found conducive to enjoyment of another kind. This mountain
commands delicious views of the valley of the Pemigewasset. A short hour
is usually sufficient for the climb. It was a very raw, windy morning
on which I climbed it, but the uncommon purity of the air and the
exceeding beauty of the landscape were most rarely combined with cloud
effects seen only in conjunction with a brisk north-west wind. I had
taken a station similar to that occupied by Mount Willard with respect
to the Saco Valley, now opening a vista essentially different from
that most memorable one in my mountain experience. The valley is not
the same. You see the undulating course of the river for many leagues,
and but for an intercepting hill, which hides them, might distinguish
the houses of Plymouth. The vales of Woodstock, Thornton, and Campton,
spotted with white houses, lie outspread in the sun, between enclosing
mountains; and the windings of the Pemigewasset are now seen dark and
glossy, now white with foam, appearing, disappearing, and finally lost
to view in the blended distance. The sky was packed with clouds. Over
the vivid green of the intervales their black shadows drifted swiftly
and noiselessly, first turning the light on, then off again, with
magical effect. To look up and see these clouds all in motion, and then,
looking down, see those weird draperies darkly trailing over the land,
was a reminiscence of
"The dim and shadowy armies of our unquiet dreams--
Their footsteps brush the dewy fern and paint the shaded streams."
The mountain ridges flowed southward with marvellous smoothness to the
vanishing-point, on one side of the valley bright green, on the other
indigo blue. This picture was not startling, like that from the Crawford
Notch, but, in its own way, was incomparable. The sunsets are said to be
beautiful beyond description.
One looks up the Notch upon the great central peaks composing
the water-shed--Cannon, Lafayette, Lincoln, and the rest--to see
crags, ridges, black forests, rising before him in all their gloomy
magnificence.
[Illustration: THE BASIN.]
On one side all is beauty, harmony, and grace; on the other, a packed
mass of bristling, steep-sided mountains seem storming the sky with
their gray turrets. Could we but look over the brawny shoulders of the
mountains opposite to us, the eye would take in the vast, untrodden
solitudes of the Pemigewasset forests cut by the East Branch and
presided over by Mount Carrigain--a region as yet reserved for those
restless and adventurous spirits whom the beaten paths of travel have
ceased to charm or attract. But an excursion into this "forest primeval"
is to be no holiday promenade. It is an arduous and difficult march
over slippery rocks, through tangled thickets, or up the beds of
mountain torrents. Hard fare and a harder bed of boughs finish the day,
every hour of which has been a continued combat with fresh obstacles.
At this price one may venture to encounter the virgin wilderness or, as
the cant phrase is, "try roughing it." It is a curious feeling to turn
your back upon the last cart-path, then upon the last foot-path; to hear
the distant baying of a hound grow fainter and fainter--in a word, to
exchange at a single step the sights and sounds of civilized life, the
movement, the bustle, for a silence broken only by the hum of bees and
the murmur of invisible waters.
I left the Flume House in company with a young-old man, whom I met
there, and in whom I hoped to find another and a surer pair of eyes,
for, were he to have as many as Argus, the sight-seer would find
employment for them all.
While gayly threading the green-wood, we came upon a miniature edition
of the Pool, situated close to the highway, called the Basin. A basin
in fact it is, and a bath fit for the gods. It is plain to see that
the stream once poured over the smooth ledges here, instead of making
its exit by the present channel. A cascade falls into it with hollow
roar. This cistern has been worn by the rotary motion of large pebbles
which the little cascade, pouring down into it from above, set and
kept actively whirling and grinding at its own mad caprice. But this
was not the work of a day. Long and constant attrition only could have
scooped this cavity out of the granite, which is here so clean, smooth,
and white, and filled to the brim with a grayish-emerald water, light,
limpid, and incessantly replenished by the effervescent cascade. In the
beginning this was doubtless an insignificant crevice, into which a few
pebbles and a handful of sand were dropped by the stream, but which,
having no way of escape, were kept in a perpetual tread-mill, until what
was at first a mere hole became as we now see it. The really curious
feature of the stone basin is a strip of granite projecting into it
which closely resembles a human leg and foot, luxuriously cooling itself
in the stream. Such queer freaks of nature are not merely curious,
but they while away the hours so agreeably that time and distance are
forgotten.
As we walked on, the hills were constantly hemming us in closer and
closer. Suddenly we entered a sort of crater, with high mountains all
around. One impulse caused us to halt and look about us. In full view
at our left the inaccessible precipices of Mount Cannon rose above a
mountain of shattered stones, which ages upon ages of battering have
torn piecemeal from it. Its base was heaped high with these ruins.
Seldom has it fallen to my lot to see anything so grandly typical
of the indomitable as this sorely battered and disfigured mountain
citadel, which nevertheless lifts and will still lift its unconquerable
battlements so long as one stone remains upon another. Hewed and
hacked, riven and torn, gashed and defaced in countless battles, one
can hardly repress an emotion of pity as well as of admiration. I do
not recollect, in all these mountains, another such striking example
of the denuding forces with which they are perpetually at war. When we
see mountains crumbling before our very eyes, may we not begin to doubt
the stability of things that we are pleased to call eternal? Still,
although it seems erected solely for the pastime of all the powers of
destruction, this one, so glorious in its unconquerable resolve to die
at its post--this one, exposing its naked breast to the fury of its
deadliest foes--so stern and terrific of aspect, so high and haughty,
so dauntlessly throwing down the gauntlet to Fate itself--assures us
that the combat will be long and obstinate, and that the mountain will
fall at last, if fall it must, with the grace and heroism of a gladiator
in the Roman arena. The gale flies at it with a shriek of impotent
rage. Winter strips off its broidered tunic and flings white dust in
its aged face. Rust corrodes, rains drench, fires scorch it; lightning
and frost are forever searching out the weak spots in its harness; but,
still uplifting its adamantine crest, it receives unshaken the stroke
or the blast, spurns the lightning, mocks the thunder, and stands fast.
Underneath is a little lake, which at sunset resembles a pool of blood
that has trickled drop by drop from the deep wounds in the side of the
mountain.
We are still advancing in this region of wonders. In our front soars an
insuperable mass of forest-shagged rock. Behind it rises the absolutely
regal Lafayette. Our footsteps are stayed by the glimmer of water
through trees by the road-side. We have reached the summit of the pass.
Six miles of continued ascent from the Flume House have brought us to
Profile Lake, which the road skirts. Although a pretty enough piece of
water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by its thousands,
or for being the source of the Pemigewasset, or for its trout--which
you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface--but for
the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully
mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit! It is difficult to
believe the evidence of the senses! Upon the high cliffs of this
mountain is the remarkable and celebrated natural rock sculpture of a
human head, which, from a height twelve hundred feet above the lake,
has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass
upon the windings of the river through its incomparable valley. The
profile itself measures about forty feet from the tip of the chin to
the flattened crown which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique
appearance. All is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by
something like the visor of a helmet. And all this illusion is produced
by several projecting crags. It might be said to have been begotten by a
thunder-bolt.
Taking a seat within a rustic arbor on the high shore of the lake,
one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most
extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A change of position varies more or
less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked
peculiarity of this monstrous _alto relievo_; for let the spectator
turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand--as he
inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some
strange hallucination--a fascination born neither of admiration nor
horror, but strongly partaking of both emotions, draws him irresistibly
back to the Dantesque head stuck, like a felon's, on the highest
battlements of the pass. The more you may have seen, the more your
feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment
is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face,
it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a
cast from a living head. You feel and will always maintain that those
features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more,
nothing less.
But where and what was the original prototype? Not man; since, ages
before he was created, the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture
upon the rock above us. No, not man; the face is too majestic, too
nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of the antique gods may,
perhaps, have sat for this archetype of the coming man. And yet not man,
we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with
futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth.
This gigantic silhouette, which has been dubbed the Old Man of the
Mountain, is unquestionably the greatest curiosity of this or any other
mountain region. It is unique. But it is not merely curious; nor is
it more marvellous for the wonderful accuracy of outline than for the
almost superhuman expression of frozen terror it eternally fixes on the
vague and shadowy distance--a far-away look; an intense and speechless
amazement, such as sometimes settles on the faces of the dying at the
moment the soul leaves the body forever--untranslatable into words, but
seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision, too bright
and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. The face puts the whole world
behind it. It does everything but speak--nay, you are ready to swear
that it is going to speak! And so this chance jumbling together of a few
stones has produced a sculpture before which Art hangs her head.
I renounce in dismay the idea of reproducing the effect on the reader's
mind which this prodigy produced on my own. Impressions more pronounced,
yet at the same time more inexplicable, have never so effectually
overcome that habitual self-command derived from many experiences of
travel among strange and unaccustomed scenes. From the moment the
startled eye catches it one is aware of a _Presence_ which dominates the
spirit, first with strange fear, then by that natural revulsion which
at such moments makes the imagination supreme, conducts straight to
the supernatural, there to leave it helplessly struggling in a maze of
impotent conjecture. But, even upon this debatable ground, between two
worlds, one is not able to surprise the secret of those lips of marble.
The Sphinx overcomes us by his stony, his disdainful silence. Let the
visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to
resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a
first sight of this weird object forces upon him. He is, indeed, less
than human if the feeling does not continually grow and deepen while
he looks. The face is so amazing, that I have often tried to imagine
the sensations of him who first discovered it peering from the top of
the mountain with such absorbed, open-mouthed wonder. Again I see the
tired Indian hunter, pausing to slake his thirst by the lake-side,
start as his gaze suddenly encounters this terrific apparition. I
fancy the half-uttered exclamation sticking in his throat. I behold
him standing there with bated breath, not daring to stir hand or foot,
his white lips parted, his scared eyes dilated, until his own swarthy
features exactly reflect that unearthly, that intense amazement stamped
large and vivid upon the livid rock. There he remains, rooted to the
spot, unable to reason, trembling in every limb. For him there are no
accidents of nature; for him everything has its design. His moment of
terrible suspense is hardly difficult to understand, seeing how careless
thousands that come and go are thrilled, and awed, and silenced,
notwithstanding you tell them the face is nothing but rocks.
[Illustration: THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN.]
If the effect upon minds of the common order be so pronounced, a first
sight of the Great Stone Face may easily be supposed to act powerfully
upon the imaginative and impressible. The novelist, Hawthorne, makes
it the interpreter of a noble life. For him the Titanic countenance is
radiant with majestic benignity. He endows it with a soul, surrounds the
colossal brow with the halo of a spiritual grandeur, and, marshalling
his train of phantoms, proceeds to pass inexorable judgment upon them.
Another legend--like its predecessor, too long for our pages--runs to
the effect that a painter who had resolved to paint Christ sitting in
judgment, and who was filled with the grandeur of his subject, wandered
up and down the great art palaces, the cathedrals of the Old World,
seeking in vain a model which should in all things be the embodiment of
his ideal. In despair at the futility of his search he hears a strange
report, brought by some pious missionaries from the New World, of a
wonderful image of the human face which the Indians looked upon with
sacred veneration. The painter immediately crossed the sea, and caused
himself to be guided to the spot, where he beheld, in the profile of the
great White Mountains, the object of his search and fulfilment of his
dream. The legend is entitled _Christus Judex._
Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his "Manfred," the
scene of which is laid among the mountains of the Bernese Alps, would
doubtless have had a deeper and perhaps gloomier impulse; but even among
the eternal realms of ice the poet never beheld an object that could
so arouse the gloomy exaltation he has breathed into that tragedy. His
line--
"Bound to earth, he lifts his eye to heaven"--
becomes descriptive here.
Again and again we turn to the face. We go away to wonder if it is still
there. We come back to wonder still more. An emotion of pity mingles
with the rest. Time seems to have passed it by. It seems undergoing some
terrible sentence. It is a greater riddle than the gigantic stone face
on the banks of the Nile.
All effects of light and shadow are so many changes of countenance or of
expression. I have seen the face cut sharp and clear as an antique cameo
upon the morning sky. I have seen it suffused, nay, almost transfigured,
in the sunset glow. Often and often does a cloud rest upon its brow. I
have seen it start fitfully out of the flying scud to be the next moment
smothered in clouds. I have heard the thunder roll from its lips of
stone. I recall the sunken cheeks, wet with the damps of its night-long
vigil, glistening in the morning sunshine--smiling through tears. I
remember its emaciated visage streaked and crossed with wrinkles that
the snow had put there in a night; but never have I seen it insipid or
commonplace. On the contrary, the overhanging brow, the antique nose,
the protruding under-lip, the massive chin, might belong to another
Prometheus chained to the rock, but whom no punishment could make lower
his haughty head.