XIX. A MOUNTAIN POINT OF VIEW
“Wite man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” cries Vachel playfully from behind me as we get out of forests and up among the naked rocks. “Wite man, you’s skeerin’ me to death,” or again, “You might as well kill a man as scare him to death.”
“This is no place to bring ladies,” I ventured.
“And no place to bring a poet, either,” says Vachel. “Look here, Stephen, I make one rule. I’ll only be scared out of my wits once a day.”
The poet riveted his eyes on me, and I was a curious sight, being torn to tatters from head to foot. I had been mending my trousers with the stuff of my vest and the lining of my coat. “Stephen,” cries Vachel, “when I get tired of looking at the scenery I look at your pants.” And I employed much time when we rested sewing up the triangles and flaps on my knees with white thread drawn from our mosquito netting.
We saw now the wonderful cathedral-shaped mountain behind us, blue and white and scarred and crumpled. It lifted its clerestory with grandiosity up into the colder and rarer air. Its rivelled snow hung in great white copes; its earthquake rents and chasms yawned, and its dreadful steeps, up which no man ever climbed, drew sternly and austerely up to summits and spires and towers. Grandiose mountain! And what little flies, what microscopical insects we were upon it!
We came to the top of the Valley of Boulder Creek, stretching away from the heart of the Rockies to the tents of the Indians and the indeterminate plains, one of the grandest of views to my companion, who loves the prairie like the prairie child, an aperçu of America seen from the mountains. “That is what we want to get,” said Vachel, “a Rocky Mountain point of view on all things American. That is the true meaning of calling it a national park.”
“Not only that, but a world-point-of-view can be found,” said I. “That is why it was called Going-to-the-Sun Mountain—the sun sees everything.”
We turned, however, into a wild and obscure region and blundered and staggered among a miscellany of all kinds of boulders. Blue lakelets and pools lay at the foot of djinns of snow, and there were dreadful iceberg-like reflections in the weird blueness of the water. We camped on a plateau, or rather in a wide, high trough surrounded by mountain-sides, and we made a fire of old resinous roots and stumps of dead, dwarfed trees. There were shallow lakes in sight, but the way to them was over undulating, quaking moss. Mists encircled us before nightfall and made our fire ghostly. We lay all night in a great stillness, and the fire glowered and smouldered and the mist uneasily crept into rain with a breeze or settled again into mist with the calm. Next day was a cold and chilling morning like November in England, and we heaped higher the fire with wood and slept till wind and sun conquered cloud and damp. And that was nearly noon.
“Onward,” cried Vachel, “upward, higher, purer, better, nobler, sweeter, stronger”—which was his favourite war-cry at the time, and amid stark upper-mountain scenery we made a glorious afternoon march to a place of great height. At length, on what seemed a terrifically high pedestal of black rock, we gleaned a coffee-pot full of fresh snow and proposed to make tea. And I upset the evaporated milk, but licked it up off the rocks with the flat of my tongue. This Vachel was too proud to do, so I have surmised that his progenitors were Lowland Scottish gentlemen farmers, but mine were Border cattle thieves and “land loupers.”
We had supper that evening in a great, open mountain space, with glaciers as large as cities brooding and impending over abysses, and we looked downward to dark and gloomy rising forests gone tired on their way up towards us, and we looked upwards to the grandeur of snow-covered crags and tumultuous, heaven-climbing waves of rock. Vachel fried the beans to an accompaniment of rhythmical remarks. Poetry possessed us both. All about us was in grand, romantic, heroic strain. Vachel remarked how the forests were like harps with long harp strings, and the strings were the lines which mountain stones and avalanches had furrowed there for ages. The carpet on which we lay was of yellow vetches and dark-blue gentians, with lichened stones all interspersed. Heaven itself was not flat-roofed above us, but raised at the zenith, a blue vault above us, like the dome of a world-temple. And the fire burned a black patch on the green and puffed and flamed symbolically as if we were children of the Old Testament sacrificing there to our God.
Two stars arose above the mountain’s head,
Two stars looked down upon the world in bed;
Looked through the window-panes and saw the world at home,
From Babylon to Tyre, and Rome to Rome.
What if the stars, lifting their tiny lamps,
Were but like us, a couple of old tramps?
Heaven’s tramps the stars, blazing their trails they go,
From mountain-top to mountain-top and snow to snow.
‘I HAD RATHER BE A PEACOCK THAN A HOG’ SAID THE PEACOCK