Round the Wonderful World

by G. E. Mitton

"Are you going to live out here permanently?"

"No; not good enough. I've been knocking about now two years, and unless you've got capital you can't make a start; a man can always keep himself, of course, and you see something of life too, but for a permanency, no, it's not good enough! I wrote to my people only last week I'd be turning up next fall to settle down again."

He has to go to help the men who are raising the wheels of the truck on to the line again with jacks. It has been a queer accident altogether. The train was running down in the early hours of this morning when a huge boulder, which had been loosened by the vibration of its passing, fell with terrific force against this particular car, and knocked it off the rails; the coupling-pin connecting it with the next one in front broke, and the engine and first few trucks ran on a little. Luckily the derailed truck ploughed the ground and stopped within a foot or two of the awful gulf yawning below, though those following, which had kept on the track, gave it a shunt forward.

It is not long before all is shipshape again, and we draw slowly past, waving to Wharton, who stands up in his caboose, or van, a handsome, healthy figure of a man. He was one of the best short-slips Winchester ever had. For some time after this we pass waiting trains at every siding, for all the traffic has been held up by the accident.

For the rest of that day it is difficult to spare thoughts for anything but the scenery. It is grander than anything I have ever seen in my life. Very few people in England realise that there is not one but three ranges of mountains to be crossed from the coast. We are through the first now and into the Selkirks, and we have to climb right up these and down again before starting on the heights of the Rockies, which is the only range most people know by name. The peaks, which rise majestically round, are often tree-clad far up; we see huge pines, centuries old, towering out of a tangle of undergrowth that has probably never been trodden by any human foot, not even those of the Indians. There is a great deal of dead wood to be seen, and this hangs out in banners of brown among the sombre green, and here and there are long strips of brilliant emerald, which stand out like streaks. We apply to the long-suffering attendant, who tells us that they are the new growth on some great gash, cut possibly by a fall or landslide in the winter, and as we go along he shows us some of these bare patches, yet unhealed, torn by an avalanche of stones and mud and snow.

INDIANS IN MODERN CLOTHES.

We pass on long trestle bridges over foaming torrents far below, and it makes us shudder to think what would happen if the train went over. That man in the smoking-car last night told me a story of what happened to himself on this line, some twenty years ago, when he was crossing over the barrier. The train he was in was trying to get up a tremendously steep incline on a dark and stormy night. The worst of these inclines are not used now, for the way has been engineered round them. The wheels were slipping on the greasy rails, and the engine was snorting and sending up showers of sparks, and inch by inch, foot by foot, the driver manœuvred her up, till he reached one of these bridges. There is a man stationed on duty at each of them. There, notice his hut as we pass—they have to guard the road and see to the safety of it and signal to the train if anything happens to the bridge. The driver communicated with the man on the bridge he had reached, and asked him to wire for an engine to meet him at the next bridge and help him up. Engines are kept in certain places ready for an emergency like this; so the wire was sent and the train struggled on, but when they got to the next bridge there was no engine. The message had gone through all right, and the man in charge there had received a reply that the relief engine had started, and it ought to have arrived by then, but there was no sign of it. The line is a single one you notice, all the way, except at certain places, where there are loops to allow trains to pass each other in the same way as on some tram-lines. After waiting some time the engine-driver steamed slowly ahead. He climbed on and up, and went very slowly, expecting at every turn to meet the relief engine, or find it waiting for him, held up at a bridge. But no, there was no sign of it, and yet every bridge-keeper gave him the same message—it had been sent out and should have been here by now. At last he reached the depôt itself, but there was no engine! What had happened to it? It had been dispatched on the single line, full steam up, into that stormy night, and it had vanished completely! A search-party was sent out in the morning, and found at one of the loops a slight fracture in the line; close to it the ground had been ploughed up, and there, far below, lay a shattered mass of iron and steel in the narrow valley, with the torrent plunging over it. For some unexplained reason the engine had left the rails and pitched straight over the precipice, carrying with her the two men in charge, who were, of course, killed outright.

Beside the bridges there are tunnels and snow-sheds frequently on this line. Our puny tunnels in England are nothing to these; a new one which is just being bored through the Selkirks and fitted with electric light, is five miles in length! The snow-sheds are very peculiar; they are built out over the line with sloping roofs, so that when the avalanches of snow and stones and ice come flying down as the grip of winter relaxes, they are carried off right over any train that may happen to be passing, and thunder on into the valley below. For the line is for the most part laid on a mere shelf hewn out of the rock, with a precipice on the one side and the towering wall of the mountain on the other. We are not likely to get avalanches or snow-slides now, but in the spring it is an extraordinary experience to be in the train and hear the roar and rattle, as of big guns, followed by a hail of bullets, as tons of stuff come down, and most of it goes shooting into space, though a good deal is left on the sheds.

These deep narrow valleys through which the rivers foam are called cañons, and the narrowest point we pass through is called Hell's Gate. Here the rigid walls of the cliffs come so near together that you could easily throw a stone across, and the tossing, foaming water careers along hundreds of feet below. The marvel is how any engineer could have made a line here at all. Think of the blasting and of the machinery which had to be used; how did they ever manage it? For before the track was cut there was nothing to rest on. The engineers must have rigged up some sort of scaffolding, I suppose, but it seems incredible. They had no choice but to do it, for there was no other way to get the line through, except by these narrow valleys, already occupied by a tempestuous river. The railway never would have been made at all but for that grand old man, Lord Strathcona, who died so recently. It was he who inspired people with his own enthusiasm and indomitable perseverance, and he at last who had the honour of driving in the spike which joined up the two ends of the line, that coming up from the Pacific slope, and that which had run across the plains from the Atlantic, and thus he bridged the continent. One of the finest peaks in the mountains is called after him. And the great "park" of 830 square miles, now being formed on Vancouver Island, is to be called Strathcona Park.