INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
For several days I had seen the Rockies far off--a black and jagged
coil of mountains, that seemed at times almost to be moving like some
prehistoric great scaly beast on its endless crawl across the plains.
Now I was to see them near by--some part of them at least. What has
any man seen in that ocean of mountains but a few drops?
At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I disengaged myself from one of
the three double beds with which my room in the hotel was furnished,
washed slightly, dressed completely, and walked to the station.
Calgary was quiet at last. There had been a sound of revelry by
night. A man with a tenor voice had been singing songs in some
adjacent room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs and the vamped
accompaniment to them had ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't
{171} remember to have passed any one on the way to the station.
There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there;
there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what
the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits
up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and
the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are
sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in--all
those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul.
[Illustration: MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.]
The train I was waiting for entered slowly with the usual peal of
bells. All the blinds were drawn in the sleeping-carriages; and the
only sign of life from them was the protruded woolly head, here and
there, of a negro car conductor. I think I was the only person who
got in.
'What a lot of people,' I said to myself as I sat down in an empty
smoking compartment, and shivering lit a pipe, 'would envy the
prospects of a man about to spend days and perhaps weeks in the heart
of the Rockies.' 'What a lot of people,' myself replied to me,
'would see the Rockies further before they got out of bed at this
unholy hour.'
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My pipe held the balance between us and gradually soothed the
rebellious part of me. It was still too dark to see anything, and
there was nothing to be done but wait patiently for the dawn. I
could not but regret that I was missing the scenery of the foothills,
for which those who have lived among them seem to have a peculiar
affection. But I was consoled by the entry a little later of two
fellow-passengers, who had evidently been disturbed in their sleep
and wanted smoke and conversation. Strange and various types one
sees in a Westbound train. The West is still--even to the Canadian
born--the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and
Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son
of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find
gold, where successful men go because they want to be more
successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy
themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which
hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up
of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest
constitution; where the failures go because they have tried all other
places, and the last is {173} West. All sorts of other men may be
seen going West too--bank clerks and lumbermen, commercial travellers
and engineers, tourists and politicians, trappers and amateurs of
sport. But I never saw a more strangely assorted pair than these two
men who came into the smoking compartment where I sat as the train
mounted the foothills.
One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but
his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He
had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and
cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old
billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The
other was a lumberjack--hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and
strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion
that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man--as they came in
together--was already engaged in telling the young one what you might
call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even
thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement.
What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that
so elderly a person should enter into such topics with {174} so much
zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as
old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'
And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become
more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became
indeed so elevated by it--especially after the boy had got up once or
twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his
delight--that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more
startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of
religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny
variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it
must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap
arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected
happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was
plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm
that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt
positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more
annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently
directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off
easily enough. Any {175} debater could have. But it was clear that
the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was
not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got
indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time
and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's
boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all
the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am
afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much
learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he
yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with
arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never
known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack--or in a
way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words
unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the
simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake
could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the
statement that 'A man by ---- could only stick to the ---- faith that
he had, and Daddy was a ---- fool to think his that ---- arguments
made any difference'--wore the old free-thinker out in {176} the end.
He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared,
not a better old man.
Meanwhile we were getting into the hills, and my first impressions
were rather of great rocks than of mountains. Most people, I
suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the east, and they seem
tremendous if only for the reason that one has come upon them after
days spent in those plains which, even while they rise, rise
imperceptibly. But tremendous as they seem from the east, they must
be far more so from the north, and far more beautiful from the west.
On the east the mountains have less height than on the north. Their
timber is poor by comparison with the trees that grow further west;
their valleys have little of the luxuriance of the Pacific valleys.
One feels a certain coldness and hardness about them, and after a
little while there seems almost a monotony of corrugated peaks, all
thrown together and slanting eastward. They are striking enough even
so, and the view from the train, especially when one considers that
railways are run through mountains by the easiest route not by the
finest, and that grades have to be counted before landscapes, cannot
disappoint anybody.
[Illustration: A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES]
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Comparisons with the Alps and the Himalayas should be kept till the
Rockies have been seen at closer quarters. The finest view I ever
had of the Rockies was from a mountain in the Selkirks, at a height
of over ten thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from the nearest
railway. There I forgot to make comparisons, which after all are
somewhat useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are softer and
more pictorial--showing that deep blue sky above their snows, which
is rarely if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian skies are
too lofty and distant ever to seem to be resting even on the topmost
snowfields. The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled.
Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, cannot be matched among the
Rockies. But the Rockies--well, the Rockies are different. As yet
we are only just getting to Banff.
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