The peak is calculated to enchain the eye by its towering height and faultless symmetry. Did Nature herself design and fashion it for its strange destiny? Was it indeed reserved for its present consecration? Who may know? Life is a chain of sequences divinely ordered. It lieth not with man to direct his steps.
"The shuttle of the Unseen powers
Works out a pattern not as ours."
In the matter of naming new places in Canada the Geographic Board is the governing body. It was at their meeting in Ottawa in March 1916 that the decision was made that this peak should immortalise the name of Edith Cavell. The suggestion had previously been made that the name of Mount Robson should be changed to that of Mount Cavell, but this would have been so inevitably confusing all over the world that it was thought wiser to select a peak hitherto unnamed. To Dr. E. Deville, the Surveyor-General, the Geographic Board therefore made this announcement much to the gratification of that well-known official. Thus is a woman's life of simple faithfulness to duty lifted into immortal resplendence. What a monitor suggesting unfaltering devotion to great issues will Mount Edith Cavell remain to the throngs of passengers on this Grand Trunk Pacific line, who will watch for its appearance on the horizon, and gaze, with steadfast view, until it fades in the far distance. For several miles can it be seen, and what traveller will gaze on this height without feeling it to be one of the spellbinders of the Dominion? or without finding himself involuntarily recalling those wonderful lines of Emerson?
"Inspirer, prophet evermore!
Pillar which God aloft hath set
So that men might it not forget;
It shall be life's ornament
And mix itself with each event.
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well!"
Brulè Lake, in Jasper Park, is an expansion of the Athabasca River, and the railroad line follows the east bank of the lake. Canada would be the paradise of Undine, the water sprite of La Motte Fouqué's famous story, for rivers broaden into lakes, and lakes connect themselves by a chain of rivers, until the continuous possibilities for inland navigation appeal to the geologist as a problem of the ages to be solved. Many theories are evolved; even as they are in Arizona, as to the origin of that apparently impenetrable mystery, the petrified forest.
At the station of Miette Hot Springs another excursion may beckon to some travellers in that up the valley of Fiddle Creek, which flows into the Athabasca River. There are a number of basins encrusted with yellow from the sulphur that abounds in the water, which has strong medicinal properties, and which ranges from a hundred and eleven to a hundred and twenty-seven degrees in temperature.
Then, too, there are the Punch Bowl Falls, reached by an attractive trail from the station known as Pocahontas. Jasper Park extends to the boundary line which marks the division between Alberta and British Columbia; and crossing this boundary the traveller finds himself in another of Canada's gigantic reserves, that of Mount Robson Park, with Mount Robson itself as the centre dominating the entire region. The train stops at Mount Robson station, and one seems to enter a new world in this near approach to that king and monarch of the Canadian Rockies, the peak of Mount Robson towering upwards for 13,068 feet in the clear air. Of his first view of this peak Lawrence J. Burpee, F.R.G.S., writes:
"... Almost without warning it came. We rounded the western end of the Rainbow Mountains and looked up the valley of the Grand Fork. 'My God!' some one whispered. Rising at the head of the valley and towering far above all the surrounding peaks we saw a vast cone, so perfectly proportioned that one's first impression was rather one of wonderful symmetry and beauty than of actual height. Then we began to realise the stupendous majesty of the mountain...."
It is not only that Mount Robson is supreme in the range of the Rockies in Canada, but it is one of the notable mountains of the world. In its peculiar beauty of form and proportion it is hardly surpassed by any known peak. It has many aspects and phases—it is clearly seen in brilliant sunshine, it is dimly discerned when it enwraps itself in clouds and ethereal mists, it is seen again by resplendent moonlight—and one finds each phase has its own enchantment. Its glistening crest is visible for twelve miles after the train pulls out from the station. Its colossal glacier tumbles masses of ice-fields down into Berg Lake at the foot, and these masses of ice continue to drift on the surface of emerald water that holds its colour in the same strange way as do the waters of the Gulf of Corinth.