With all due deference to American susceptibility on such points, I must say that the scenery of the Rockies which one sees from the windows of a car on the Union Pacific does not begin to compare with the scenery along the Canadian Pacific line. Even Echo Cañon and Weber Cañon, the show places of the line, struck me as comparatively insignificant when I remembered the splendours of Eagle Pass and the grandeurs of Bear Cañon.
But when the wilderness of Nevada had been cast behind our flying wheels, and we began to climb up the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada—that snow-crowned mountain wall which divides one of the dreariest from one of the most beautiful regions on earth, the Great American Desert from “God’s own country”—it was time to sit up and use both your eyes and do your best to look out at both sides of the car at once.
It was here that the last and most beautiful stretch of the thirty-two-hundred-mile run began. Up the straight grades and round and round the twice and thrice-tiered loops the great train twined and circled; now skirting the shore of a still, pine-fringed lake, filling the bottom of a mountain valley; and now burrowing under the long snow-sheds, groaning under their weight of snow far away up the mountain-side, and so, mile by mile of distance, and yard by yard of height, the top of the Great Divide was reached.
The iron horses took a rest and a long drink at Alta, the summit station, and then,
“Down the valley with our guttering breaks a-squeal,”
we started on our way to that lovely land which lies between the mountains and the sea.
The snow vanished; first from the sides of the track, and then from the gullies between the hills round which we twined. The mist-clouds rolled away behind us up the wooded slopes. The snow-peaks far beyond gleamed out above them, and ahead and below the dropping sun shone on a land of broken red hills, and, beyond them, over a vast level stretch of green grass and fruit-land, with a broad river flowing through it.
Beyond this again it glimmered far and faintly on a long streak of flickering silver. The red hills were the native land of Truthful James; the green plains below were the Valley of the Sacramento; and the shimmering silver in the far distance was the Pacific Ocean, whose character I propose hereafter to revise.
Then we rushed down through the last cañon out on to an open slope, and pulled up at Red Gulch. That is not its name on the time-tables, but it ought to be.
A freight truck had got off the line about two miles lower down. So, instead of a stop of ten minutes, we had to wait two hours, which I thankfully employed in making a little excursion through Bret Harte Land, the land of red earth and yellow gold, of towering pines and flower-filled valleys, of deliciously mingled beauty and ugliness; where the skies are as blue as they are above the Isles of the South, and the air seems like what one would expect to breathe in Paradise.