In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive peak of Thunderhead towers preëminent among the summits of the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly significant.
What strange attraction of the earth laid hold on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations of the range?
Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage they rise,—rise!
Alas! the earth clasps its knees; the mountains twine their arms about it; hoarded ores of specious values weigh it down. It cannot soar! Only the cumbrous image of an ethereal thing! Only the ineffective wish vainly fashioned like the winged aspiration!
It may have said naught of this to Ben Doaks, but it exerted strenuous fascinations on the sense alert to them. Always he turned his eyes toward Thunderhead, as he came and went among his cattle on the neighboring heights of Piomingo Bald, a few miles distant to the northeast. Often he left the herder’s cabin in the woods below, and sat for hours on a rock on the summit, smoking his pipe and idly watching the varying aspects of the great peak. Sometimes it was purple against the azure heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green spaces of the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the clans had gathered to claim the changeling.
“’Pears-like ter me ez I couldn’t herd cattle along of a mo’ low-sperited, say-nuthin’ critter’n ye be, Ben,” his partner remarked one day, sauntering up the slope and joining him on the summit. “Ye jes’ set up hyar on the bald an’ gape at Thunderhead like ez ef ye war bereft. Now, down in the cove ye always air toler’ble good company,—nimble-tongued ez ennybody.”
He thrust his cob-pipe into his mouth and pulled away silently at it, gazing at the smoke as it curled up with delicate sinuosity and transparently blue.
Ben Doaks did not reply at once. There was no need of haste on Piomingo Bald.
“Waal, I dunno but it air a sorter lonesome place, an’ a-body don’t feel much like talkin’ no-ways,” he drawled at last. “But ye’ll git used ter it, Mink,” he added, in leisurely encouragement. “Ye’ll git used ter it, arter a while.”
Mink looked down disconsolately at the vast array of mountains below him on every side. The nearest were all tinged with a dusky purple, except for the occasional bare, garnet-colored stretches of the “fire-scalds,” relics of the desolation when the woods were burned; the varying tints were sublimated to blue in the distance; then through every charmed gradation of ethereal azure the ranges faded into the invisible spaces that we wot not of. There was something strangely overwhelming in the stupendous expanse of the landscape. It abashed the widest liberties of fancy. Somehow it disconcerted all past experience, all previous prejudice, all credence in other conditions of life. The fact was visibly presented to the eye that the world is made of mountains.