Come, my love, and let us wander
Cross the hills and over yonder.—CY WARMAN.
Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, has been so often called the playgrounds of the West, that the words have become trite and fail to carry their true significance. This fact is inevitably borne in on the Canadian who visits the place, and he wonders to himself why he has failed to understand it before.
Assuredly this is my experience as I ride around Tunnel Mountain this beautiful August day. The road is seven miles long, and from its winding ascent, one may look across the hills and down the wide valley where the green waters of the Bow River foam into white over the rocks. This is the full-robed, full-voiced choir of the mountain temple, but I do not know what it sings.
The Valley of the Bow River with its amphitheatre of hills is the wonder picture of the Rockies, combining, as it does, all that is most beautiful in are and nature. [Transcriber's note: because of the oddness of the grammar of this sentence, it may be that one or more words are missing.]
Across it, on Tunnel Mountain, is the splendid hostelry of the Canadian Pacific Railway; warm sulphur springs that bubble up out of the earth, and a cave of waters which is an extinct geyser, but might be the matrix of the hills themselves.
Geologists say that the eastern ranges of the Rocky Mountains are of the Eocene Age, and that the western ridges are Pliocene, and eons younger. But these revelations of science are almost as overwhelming as our ignorance. They tell of the immensity of time but do not sound it. It is not possible to level them to our mental capacity.
A wealthy Sheik who once lived in the Land of Uz told us how God challenged him to answer certain questions about the mountains.
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"
"Who hath stretched the line upon it?"
"Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of the waters?"