The wonderful journey, whose majestic splendour so impressed itself upon individual life that, in a sense, it could never be over, had its termination at Prince Rupert. There, again, one may watch the rose and flame of dawn and the glory of colour from terraced heights over-looking sea and land; and in all the play of colour reflected from a thousand waters he may almost find prefigured the twelve gates of the Heavenly City that were all of pearl; and the foundations of the wall which were garnished with precious stones—jasper and sapphire, emerald and chrysolite, and last—an amethyst!
CHAPTER IX
PRINCE RUPERT AND ALASKA
Mrs. Carlyle declared that when Robert Browning's poem of Sordello appeared she read it through twice with the deepest attention, but that at the conclusion of the second reading she was utterly unable to determine as to whether "Sordello" was a tree, an island, or a man. Somewhat of the same bewilderment has beset many people of late years in regard to any mention of Prince Rupert, the young seaport of the great North-West. One citizen of the United States to whom a rather unusual degree of cosmopolitan travel had been allotted by the Fates that appointed his not undistinguished destiny, and who enjoyed the well-earned admiration of a host of friends as being pre-eminently entitled to speak with authority on many abstract matters for which those less erudite cared little and, alas! knew less, assured his votaries, on inquiry, that Prince Rupert was a town somewhere in the "Dolomites" and that its title should be spelled with a final "z"; while another cheerfully relegated Prince Rupert to the maritime provinces of Canada. Still another, who was nothing if not historical, connected the name only with that of the son of Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who was created Duke of Cumberland in 1644 and who so distinguished himself in scientific pursuits that he was rewarded with a tomb in Westminster Abbey (somewhere about 1682). His portrait, painted by Sir Peter Lely, is in the National Portrait Gallery at London. Not to prolong mere pleasantries, however, the Prince Rupert whose citizens forecast for it the future of the "Liverpool of America" is really the terminal of that vast and splendid new transcontinental highway, the Grand Trunk System.
Prince Rupert was really created in Boston (U.S.A.), for before the dense forest covering the rocky island with an almost impenetrable growth was felled, the town was laid out by Messrs. Brett and Hall, one of the most distinguished firms of landscape architects in the United States. As a result it is one of the most charmingly designed cities of the entire northern continent. The scenic setting of Prince Rupert is one of incomparable beauty, with its ineffable glory of sea and sky, its hills and cliffs, with terrace above terrace, a scenic setting that suggests, and even rivals, that of Algiers, or Naples, or Genoa, in that unique order of picturesque loveliness investing the cities that rise from terraces above blue seas, with architectural splendours silhouetted against the sapphire sky.
Kaien Island, upon which the main part of the city will stand, comprises some 28 square miles lying 550 miles north of Vancouver. From the magnificent harbour the island rises imperiously, dominated by its central peak, Mount Hays, which towers to some 2300 feet in the clear air, with a grandeur of outlook that the artistic genius of Messrs. Brett and Hall admirably utilised in a way that insures the young city so novel and delightful a background. From Mount Hays the view over the harbour, the islands, and the far waters of the Pacific, and over lakes, forests, and rivers on the mainlands, is a view to be included among the noblest scenic delights of the world. No more romantic panorama discloses itself from Amalfi, Hong Kong, or from the Acropolis of Athens. Nor is Prince Rupert icebound and stormbound in the winter, for the Japanese current that washes the shores insures an open harbour all the year round. The entrance to the bay is singularly commodious and is usually free from fog. The harbour of Prince Rupert has every claim to be considered one of the finest in the world.
The task on which Messrs. Brett and Hall entered was a novel one. It was nothing less than the creation of a city seen in ideal vision. On the actual site was a waste and wild of rocks and stones, of tangled undergrowth and huge stumps of trees that had been felled. The mountain, also, had to be reckoned with, and even if the Boston landscape experts had possessed that traditional faith which is said to be able to remove mountains, they did not wish to remove Mount Hays. Like Mount Royal, in stately, splendid Montreal, the mountain was the most picturesque of assets. Here and there some giant tree had escaped the fate of its companions, and stood as if contemplating their fate. The uncompromising debris, the rocky sub-stratum, the abounding mass of loose stone, all combined to present difficulties. "Prince Rupert! A town hewn out of solid rock," has since that day been the description of the new city, quoted with appreciative interest.
How did Messrs. Hall and Brett attack the problem? It was a complexity of topography that baffled, if it did not defy, solutions. But Nature yields, perforce, to the necromancy of genius, and the initial achievement was to create a series of planes, planes level, planes inclined, and they then discovered that the trend of all these was, naturally, from north-east to south-west. Nature smiled upon them to the degree of establishing the means for all these planes to be, approximately, parallel in direction. Doubtless these landscape creators (being Bostonians) congratulated themselves in true Emersonian phrase on the truth that:
"... the world is built in order
And the atoms march in tune."