High mountains of picturesque contours almost surround the city. It is a sad fact that at this season of the year a dense shroud of smoke usually envelopes the bulk of the uplands. Fortunately a copious rain cleared up the atmosphere just before our arrival. We passed through the town three years ago twice, and afterwards lay at its pier three days, while our ship was getting ready to sail for Japan; and all the while supposed the place was a great forest plain, until the morning of our departure, when a rain washed down the smoke and revealed magnificent mountain scenery close about us.
To one taking the train at Vancouver for the East, fine scenery faces him as he emerges from the station and then continues to greet the eye, varying and growing for the next 600 miles, never once tame, often beautiful or grand and sublime, and frequently terrible. It changes rapidly and as unexpectedly as the pictures presented by a revolving kaleidoscope. Lofty mountains, lifted up in rounded forms of granite, gneiss and other igneous rocks, massive and grand, like mighty boulders welded together, with monster trees in the valley below, and tall and straight ones high above wherever a ledge or a fissure affords their hardy roots chance to take hold, flank the road for the first ninety miles. On the north side of the Frazer River, whose broad white stream is soon reached, and which for the first 90 miles runs from East to West, these mountains arise immediately from the road. Across the river to the south more or less removed, from one to several miles, they show themselves in all their solid grandeur.
Rounded boulder shaped mountains of granite or igneous rocks are to me far more impressive than much taller ones of other formations. One feels that they are solid, and are welded to the central foundations of earth; that they were the offsprings of primal overpowering heat, while the others are made up of tiny particles of disintegrated igneous stone, loosely thrown together by glacial moraines or dropped at ocean's bottom, and after eons of time compressed into hardness. Their walls were uplifted by the pressure from below of belching granite, or were crumbled together by the cramped earth, and their points, pinnacles, and needles were fashioned by rains and slow chemical processes. They are the offspring of other than their own power and are shaped by puny causes acting through untold ages. The rounded granite mountains, however, lifted themselves and rushed forth from the seat of earth's central fires, moved by their own inherent forces.
One feels that mountains of secondary rocks are a mass of tiny things thrown aloft as the creation of other than their own powers. They may tower far above the snow line, and may pierce the vaulted sky with their sharp needles and tooth like pinnacles in the silent regions of eternal ice; but we know that their loftiest horns once lay beneath the ocean's wave, and after being hoisted as an impotent mass, have been cut and fashioned into sharpness by the gnawing tooth of frost. We know that they were borne up upon the breast of boiling, seething primitive rocks, and that they now rest upon the shoulders of granite titans. We know that they are crumbling day by day, and are being borne away upon pigmy streams into ocean depths. They are perishable and are perishing.
But yonder rounded form whose smooth head barely reaches the clouds, has its foundations welded by inconceivably fierce fires; fires kindled when this earth was rounded by the will of God from a formless void—welded to the very base and heart of the globe. It rose upon the crest of a molten sea, rending and tearing away everything its way, and now in adamantine coldness, seems the fit emblem of eternal duration.
One may be terrified by the pinnacled monster, but I am awed by the rounded giant.
The Canadian Pacific road furnishes observation cars through its grand mountain scenery, from a point some sixty miles from Vancouver to and into the plains east of the Rockies or for six hundred miles. This thoughtful provision should be imitated by all railroads traversing fine scenery.
A GRAND CANYON.
About ninety miles from Vancouver the milky Fraser rushes from the canyon which has held it in a close embrace for a hundred miles; from a chasm where the mountains have been split asunder, and now tower two or more thousand feet high, their feet washed in the turbulent stream, their heads cutting the sky in picturesque lines. The mountains along the canyon are all of metamorphic rock, splintered and shivered by too rapid cooling. In the course of some millions of years they have been washed down, so that what were once perpendicular walls have become precipitous heights, with every ledge and projection and all slopes which can hold soil, covered by dark green conifirae, and now and then by light green patches of deciduous shrubbery and small hardwood trees. Down toward the water the rocks are harder, and through it the river cuts its way between walls from fifty to one or more hundred feet high. These walls have defied the flood, and the river bends and winds through narrow fissures fifty to eighty feet wide, along which the white fluid rushes, almost with cascade force. Many of the projecting points and buttresses are grotesque and picturesque in the extreme.
For many miles along the canyon an old government stage road hangs on escarped walls or dips down to the waters. At one point, at a height of a thousand feet, it almost hangs over the gorge, serving now but one purpose, to make lady tourists exclaim upon the cruelty of making even gold seekers so risk themselves as did the passengers of stage coaches a score or so years ago. I said the old road almost hangs over the gorge. In fact it does frequently entirely hang. For it was timbered out so that while one wheel might be over solid rock, the other would be upon wooden sills from which a pebble could be dropped a hundred feet or more below. The stage road cost a vast sum, and is now among the many exhibitions of the destructiveness of capital as it works out new improvements. Every valuable creation of capital wrecks all others whose place it takes. The older ones have performed their tasks, and now become comparatively useless.