"Nervous! I'm an old stager. I have ridden with Bill Updyke and Jake Hawks many a mile in these mountains. Take it in the winter time, down hill, for instance, the road covered with ice and the driver obliged to whip his horses into a dead run to keep the coach from sliding and swinging off such a place as that," and I pointed to a precipice several hundred feet perpendicular at our left. "That's coaching!" and I placed my hand upon his shoulder affectionately. During the colloquy the Major had not opened his lips.
The vicinity is the dwelling-place of desolation; nothing but rocks about us. What had once perhaps been a solid mass of trachyte is split to fragments in the mill of the centuries, and bits from as big as one's fist to the size of one's body or a small house lay tumbled in a confused and monstrous heap, as though there might have been in the remote ages, a great temple here dedicated to the gods of old, and now in shapeless ruins.
Of the view from this great mountain peak, what shall I or any one say? Nothing! It does not admit of description; upon it, you can understand why the Indian never mounts so high. It is one of the places whence comes his inspiration of deity, the temple of his god, and he may not desecrate it with his unhallowed feet; it gathers the storm, and the sun caresses it into a smile and crowns it with glory, as he views it reverently from the valley. But we, the civilized, penetrate the mystery of these heights and find, what? humility! and feel as though we should have worshipped from afar. We have risen to receive the divine inspiration, our brother has remained below to kiss submissively the nether threshold of the sanctuary. Which is nearest to the Father?
It is very still to-day; no sound greets you save the gentlest murmur of the summer wind brushing lightly across the uninviting rocks. The wide plains checkered with green and gold, stretching away out below you, give you no sign. The city you see there, bustling with the ambition of youthful vigor, is silent as death; you recognize it as a town-plat on paper, that is all, except that it adds to the sense of your own insignificance; it may make you wonder, perhaps, why you were ever a part of the life there; it may be a shadow that you look down upon, as you would recall an almost faded dream. You turn.
"And the mountain world stands present
And behold a wond'rous corps—
Well I knew them each, though never
Had we met in life before—
Knew them by that dream-world knowledge
All unknown to earthly lore."
Just below you a vast ocean bed of billowy hills, with its stately pines dwarfed to shrubs, its shores looming up in the dim distance through their dainty veil of gray, and brooding over all that
"Awful voice of stillness,
Which the Seer discerned in Horeb;
That which hallowed Beth El's ground."
It seems like sacrilege, but the interest in that town-plat down there, or in one like it, begins tugging at the skirts of one's adoration. The sun is going down and we also must go.
I had an interview with the driver, out behind the barn. (There is a signal station on the summit and the barn is a necessity.)
"You are sure you can go to Cascade from here in two hours and a half?" I inquired.