ON THE MOUNTAIN
It was a few minutes past three on the afternoon of the day following
when Milton Rhodes and I got into his automobile and started for Mount
Rainier. When we arrived at the Park entrance, which we did about
half-past six, the speedometer showed a run of one hundred and two
miles.
"Any firearms, a cat or a dog in that car?" was the question when
Milton went over to register.
"Nope," said Milton.
There was a revolver in one of his pockets, however, and another in one
of mine. But there was no weapon in the car: hadn't I got out of the
car so that there wouldn't be?
A few moments, and we were under way again, the road, which ran through
primeval forest, a narrow one now, sinuous and, it must be confessed,
hardly as smooth as glass.
Soon we crossed Tahoma Creek, where we had a glimpse of the mountain,
its snowy, rocky heights aglow with a wonderful golden tint in the rays
of the setting sun. Strange, wild, fantastic thoughts and fears came
to me again, and upon my mind settled gloomy foreboding--sinister,
nameless, foreboding terrible as a pall. We were drawing near the great
mountain now, with its unutterable cosmic grandeur and loneliness, near
to its unknown, which Milton Rhodes and I were perhaps fated to know
soon and perhaps to know to our sorrow.
From these gloomy, disturbing thoughts, which yet had a strange
fascination too, I was at length aroused by the voice of Rhodes.
"Kautz Creek," said he.
And the next moment we shot across the stream, which went racing
and growling over its boulders, the pale chocolate hue of its water
advertising its glacial origin.
"Up about two thousand four hundred feet now," Milton added. "Longmire
Springs next. I say, Bill, I wonder where we shall be this time
tomorrow, eh?"
"Goodness knows. Sometimes I find myself wondering if the whole thing
isn't pure moonshine, a dream. An angel and a demon on the slopes of
Mount Rainier! And they say that this is the Twentieth Century!"
Rhodes smiled wanly.
"I think that you will find the thing real enough, Billy, me lad," said
he.
"Too real, maybe. The fact is that I don't know what on earth to think."
"The only thing to do is to wait, Bill. And we won't have to wait long,
either."
When we swung to the grade out of Longmire, I thought that we were at
last beginning the real climb to the mountain. But Milton said no.
"When we reach the Van Trump auto park, then we'll start up," said he.
And we did--the road turning and twisting up a forest-clad steep. Then,
its sinuosities behind us, it ran along in a comparatively straight
line, ascending all the time, to Christine Falls and to the crossing
of the Nisqually, the latter just below the end of the glacier--snout,
as they call it. Yes, there it was, the great wall of ice, four or
five hundred feet in height, looking, however, what with the earth and
boulders ground into it, more like a mass of rock than like ice. There
it was, the first glacier I ever had seen, the first living glacier,
indeed, ever discovered in all these United States--at any rate, the
first one ever reported. Elevation four thousand feet.
The bridge behind us, we swung sharp to the right and went slanting up
a steep rampart of rock, moving now away from the glacier, away from
the mountain; in other words, we were heading straight for Longmire
but climbing, climbing. At length the road, cut in the precipitous
rock, narrowed to the width of but a single auto; and at this point we
halted, for descending cars had the way.
The view here was a striking one indeed, down the Nisqually Valley and
over its flanking, tumbled mountains, and the scene would probably have
been even more striking than I found it had the spot not been one to
make the head swim. I had the out side of the auto, and I could look
right over the edge, over the edge and down the precipitous wall of
rock to the bed of the Nisqually, half a thousand feet below.
The last car rolled by, and we got the signal to come on. This narrow
part of the road passed, we swung in from the edge of the rampart, and
I confess that I was not at all sorry that we did so.
Silver Forest, Frog Heaven, Narada Falls, Inspiration Point,
then Paradise Valley, with its strange tree-forms, its beautiful
flower-meadows, and, in the distance, the Inn on its commanding
height, five thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea;
and, filling all the background, the great mountain itself, towering
fourteen thousand four hundred feet aloft; the end of our journey in
sight at last!
The end? Yes--until tomorrow. And then what? The beginning then--the
beginning of what would, in all likelihood, prove an adventure as
hazardous as it was strange, a most fearful quest.
Had I been a believer in the oneirocritical science, the things that
I dreamed that night would have ended the enterprise (as far as I was
concerned) then and there: in the morning I would have started for
Seattle instanter. But I was not, and I am not now; and yet often I
wonder why I dreamed some of those terrible things--those things which
came true.
And, through all the horror, a cowled thing, a figure with bat wings,
hovered or glided in the shadows of the background and at intervals, in
tones cavernous and sepulchral, gave utterance to that dreaded name:
"_Drome!_"