After a delightful drive, in which Nathalie and Mr. Banker were kept busy answering the many queries propounded by the sightseers, as they gazed in awed wonder at the strange rock formations with their purple and green tints, the silvery waterfalls, and the many natural beauties of the Notch, they arrived at the Flume.
Here, opposite the Flume House, they climbed a zigzagging path up a hill backed by two massive mountains, and then went through a belt of woodland to inspect the Pool. This was a mountain freak, a great basin over a hundred feet wide and forty deep, hollowed out by the Pemigewasset River’s age-old tools, sand and water, as they flowed over its rocky bed.
The lustrous green of its waters rippling between lichen-covered cliffs, and canopied by overhanging trees—that looked as if they would fall from age—was so transparent that the children could see the shiny pebbles at the bottom of the Pool.
On returning to the road they started for the Flume, passing over a wooden bridge, and then up an incline, a sort of up-hill-and-down-dale road, as it followed the mountain brook flowing from the cascade that dashed over the rocks at the head of the gorge. The wild picturesque beauty of this “Gallery of the Gods,” as Mr. Banker called it, not only elicited many exclamations from the children, but brought forth more weird fancies from Sheila, which challenged the humorous gleam in that gentleman’s eyes many times.
The child’s mind was so rich in imagery, that every hooded mountain or queer-shaped cliff, every passing cloud or glint of sunlight as it filtered down through the leaves in the forest, and the soft patter of the raindrops as they danced on the window-pane in a storm, were sources of constant delight. In childish prattle she would tell Nathalie what the wind said as it swept through the trees, or came with a soft rustle around the corner of the veranda on a breezy day. The soft twirl of a leaf, the trill of a bird in the silent forest, were all pixie-whispers.
She would pick up a leaf from the road, beautiful to her in its satiny greenness, or some gay-petaled flower, and talk to it as if it were her dolly, or some tricksy creature from fairy-land, always giving it some fanciful name that was keenly suggestive of its nature. Animals she caressed and fondled with the fearless confidence and love of trusting childhood.
They finally reached the remarkable rock gallery in the very heart of the mountain, which Nathalie now introduced to them as Liberty Mountain. She explained that it was cut in two by the deep gorge, or fissure, known as The Flume, whose walls reached to a perpendicular height of fifty or seventy feet, while at its farther end a mountain-brook came dashing down with great splashes of white foam.
The children were hushed to profound wonder at the frowning gloom of the great wall that reached so high and dark above their heads, with its patches of green moss, and where, from its many crevices, young birches had fastened their roots, and ferns and vines clung to soften its harsh gray. Every now and then a tiny white mountain-flower could be seen peeping down at them, like a fairy, Sheila declared, from a mossy bed of green.
They climbed up and up, stepping from rock to rock, to clamber at last over the slippery smoothness of the granite ledges. Here the cascade had simmered to a lazy flow, to eddy with a silver tinkling into the many hollows that perforated the rocks, making tiny glistening pools, which gave the children unfeigned delight as they dipped their hands in its soft trickle.
But when they reached the narrow foot-bridge, sometimes only railed by a single birch pole, or a rope that clung tremblingly to one side of the steep wall, and looked down into the gorge below, they came to a sudden halt. With a haunting fascination they watched the brook as it now dashed with a mad plunge, splashed with patches of snowy foam, over the masses of green-embossed boulders, that looked as if they had been tossed, helter-skelter fashion, into the narrow slit of rock, in angry mood, by old Father Time.