He gathered an armful of dry sticks and shreds of bark, climbed the treacherous slope as Marion did some hours later, and settled himself in the half-shelter of the cave to await the morning. A rasher of bacon, a slice of bread, and a pipe of tobacco refreshed him; and he rolled himself in his blankets, and went to sleep. Like Marion in the “spare bedroom” far below, he was awakened in the night by the savage hammerings of the storm. The very rocks beneath him seemed to be jarred by that cannonade; the wind, howling around the cliff, threatened to drag him out of his cave; and the rain fell in torrents on the platform, almost flooding his stone bed. But he turned over in his blankets, 229 and hoped the mountain would “keep it up” all night. Even Sunnysides would be halted by a storm like that.
He arose at the first sign of dawn, hurried through his scant and salty breakfast, quenched his thirst with rain water scooped out of depressions in the rock, and started on. Knowing the trail at this point, he rode straight out along the platform, and came in half a minute to the spot where the wall of rock was broken down into a clutter of débris, in width some forty feet. Up through this litter of disintegrated granite the trail lurched with many twists and turns, and emerged at last upon one of the lower levels of the summit.
Trixy was winded, and for a moment Haig rested her, while he surveyed the scene. And in the thrill of that moment, facing the undertaking in which he had once failed, he all but forgot Sunnysides. The wind was low, and scarcely more difficult to meet than a stiff blow in the Park; but aside from that he saw little encouraging in the prospect. Behind him, it was true, the forests and all the hills and valleys lay clear in the morning light, with just a thin mist clinging in the gulches; and around him on all sides but one the sharp peaks stood up shining white in the first rays of the sun. But in front of him gray vapors, not yet dense enough to be described as clouds, came swirling and tumbling toward him across the stone-littered surface of the flat. Unless the sun should dissipate those vapors––He shrugged his shoulders, and rode on.
Almost fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, the bald head of Thunder Mountain, stripped as it has been of its ennobling peak, needs only three or four hundred feet to be as high as the snow-clad summits on 230 each side. Seen from afar, that bare head appears to be as flat and smooth as a table, but in reality its entire area, roughly circular in outline, and something more than three miles in its largest diameter, is broken up into terraces, into slopes and hillocks, into hollows and mounds, all strewn with, bowlders and loose stones, with here and there uprearing rocks of fantastic and suggestive shapes. There is no life there,––no birds, no conies or chipmunks that inhabit most high places of these mountains; no flowers, no grass, no sign of vegetation; nothing but granite. The trail runs sometimes plainly across level reaches of loose stones, sometimes over long smooth surfaces of rock, sometimes in and out among wildernesses of shattered and tumbled fragments of the mountain’s blasted head. At varying intervals, particularly in its more difficult stages, it is marked by small pyramids of stones, and by crosses cut crudely in the rock. Care must be taken not to miss one of these marks; for the trail, in avoiding inaccessible heaps of granite, goes in places perilously near the edge of the summit, which falls away in more than one known precipice a thousand feet to the unknown gulch below.
The wind was cold, and Haig felt that its strength was steadily increasing, though it yet blew fitfully. He made the second level without mishap, but was brought to a momentary standstill there by the fiercer rush of wind on the higher terrace. It seemed strange, at first thought, that the wind had not blown away the vapors that now enveloped him; but he saw presently that it was not blowing across the mountain, but rather in a circular, whirlwind motion that gradually became more violent. The terrace he now crossed was as 231 smooth as a floor, and he found his way only by means of the crosses carved in the rocks beneath his feet. Then the trail dropped suddenly into a shallow trough; mounted to another field of crumbled stones; and rose unevenly to a barrier that he remembered with a pang of chagrin. This was what at the first glance would have appeared to be a solid and insurmountable wall of rock, perhaps fifteen feet in height, and stretching away to the very edge of the plateau at his right, and to a wilderness of granite on the left. But directly ahead of him the wall was cleft, and there was a narrow pathway climbing up between two huge rocks that had been carved by the elements into shapes bearing a fanciful resemblance to human figures. These were the Twin Sisters.
Here Haig had been caught by a storm that hurled him back defeated; and he had, moreover, narrowly escaped a worse thing than mere defeat; for the wind had carried him off the trail, and almost to the brink of the chasm that yawned some hundred yards away. Now, remembering that experience, he spurred Trixy forward to take the aperture in the wall before the wind should suddenly become insupportable; and this time he was more fortunate. The pony leaped and clambered up the slippery path, and at the exit was caught by a blast that hurled and pinned her, as if she had been no heavier than a butterfly, against the base of the righthand towering figure. For some seconds neither horse nor man was able to move from that fixed position, where the wind flattened them against the rock. Then it swerved sharply, flung them against the other Sister with such force that Haig’s leg was 232 stunned and bruised, and finally released them with a shriek that sounded like a cry of disappointed rage. Trixy plunged forward with a snort, and Haig saw that the trail was again plain across another field of scattered stones.
Now, thrilled by this victory, he urged the pony onward at all possible speed toward the worst of all the perils of the mountain. The stone field was succeeded by a series of mounds and hollows, and this by a second slippery floor; and then he mounted the ridge that terminated in the Devil’s Chair. Here was the highest point attained by the trail: a flat rock measuring perhaps twenty yards one way, and a little less the other, lifted high above the surrounding slopes, and having (hence its name) a huge back formed by the abrupt termination of the ridge. From the chair the rock dipped in a kind of hollow like a chute, worn smooth by the winds and rains; and everything that ever fell into that chute was swallowed by the chasm of unplumbed and unestimated depth. Sometimes the wind blew up through the chute across the Devil’s Chair; sometimes it blew down through it into the chasm. It was blowing out when Parker reached the chair, and he was hurled back down, the slope three times before he acknowledged his defeat; it was blowing in when the three members of the English party were sucked down into the chasm.
Haig could have cried aloud the joy that ran through him, when, having spurred Trixy up the steep ascent to a footing on the Devil’s Chair, he found that almost a perfect calm reigned there, due to some sudden shift in the currents of the air.
“Quick, Trixy! On!” he cried.