Ha Ha Bay, where the exploring Frenchmen found such relief for their
oppressed feelings, is a long strait thrust through the mountains
southwest from the Saguenay for several miles, broadening at the head
into an oval bay, practically a basin among the crags, with two or
three French villages around it, named after various saints. The
modest one-story huts of the _habitans_ fringe the lower slopes near
the water's edge along the valleys of several small streams, each
cluster having its church with the tall spire. The basin is two or
three miles across, enclosed by bold cliffs and rounded hills, the
wide beaches of sand and pebble showing the great rise and fall of the
tide. There is a sawmill or two, and lumber and huckleberries are the
products of the district. Chicoutimi village is above the chasm, at a
point where the intervale broadens, the savage mountains retiring,
leaving a space for gentle tree-clad slopes and cultivated fields.
Standing high on the western bank are the magnificent Cathedral, the
Seminary, a Sailors' Hospital, and the Convent of the Good Shepherd,
and not far away a tributary stream pours fifty feet down the
Chicoutimi Falls in a rushing cascade of foam. There are extensive
sawmills, and timber ships come in the summer for cargoes for Europe,
and the place has railway connections with Lake St. John and thence
southward to Quebec. There is a population of about three thousand.
The universal little one-story, peak-roofed, whitewashed French
cottages abound, some having a casing of squared pieces of birch-bark
to protect them from the weather, making them look much like stone
houses, and peeping inside it is found that the inhabitants usually
utilize their old newspapers for wall-paper.
From Chicoutimi down to Tadousac the region of the Saguenay chasm is
practically without habitation. There are two or three small villages,
chiefly abodes of timber-cutters, but it is otherwise uninhabited; nor
do the precipitous cliffs usually leave any place near the river for a
dwelling to be put. As the visitor goes along on the steamboat it is a
steady and monotonous panorama of dark, dreary, round-topped crags,
with stunted firs sparsely clinging to their sides and tops where
crevices will let them, while the faces of the cliffs are white, gray,
brown and black, as their granites change in color. A few frothy but
attenuated cascades pour down narrow fissures. The scene, while
sublime, is forbidding, and soon becomes so monotonous as to be
tiresome. This gaunt and savage landscape culminates in Eternity Bay.
Ponderous buttresses here guard the narrow gulf on the southern shore,
formed by the outflow of a little river. The western portal, Cape
Trinity, as the steamboat approaches from above, appears as a series
of huge steps, each five hundred feet high, and the faithful
missionaries have climbed up and placed a tall white statue of the
Virgin on one of the steps, about seven hundred feet above the river,
and a large cross on the next higher step, both being seen from afar.
Passing around into the bay, the gaunt eastern face of this enormous
promontory is found to be a perpendicular wall of the rawest granite,
standing sixteen hundred feet straight up from the water. At the top
it grandly rises on the bay side into three huge crown-like domes,
which, upon being seen by the original French explorers when they came
up the river, made them appropriately name it the Trinity. This is one
of the most awe-inspiring promontories human eyes ever beheld, as it
rises sheer out of water over half a mile deep. Across the narrow bay,
the eastern portal, Cape Eternity, similarly rises in solemn grandeur,
with solid unbroken sides and a wooded top fully as high. The entire
Saguenay River is of much the same character, repeating these crags
and promontories in myriad forms. While not always as high, yet the
enclosing mountains elsewhere are almost as impressive and fully as
dismal. The steamboat, aided by the swift tide, moves rapidly through
the deep canyon, one rounded peak and long ridge being much like the
others, with the same monotonous dreariness everywhere, and every rift
disclosing only more distant sombre mountains. The chasm throughout
its length has no beacons for navigation, the shores being so steep
and the waters so deep they are unnecessary. A sense of relief is
felt when the open waters at Tadousac and the St. Lawrence are
reached, for the journey makes everyone feel much like a writer in the
London _Times_, who said of it: "Unlike Niagara and all other of God's
great works in nature, one does not wish for silence or solitude here.
Companionship becomes doubly necessary in an awful solitude like
this."