This hand-mirror of Venus has two tiny companion pools close by. The weary explorer may sip a draught of sweetest savor while admiring their exceeding beauty—a beauty heightened by its unexpectedness, and teaching that not all is barren even here. A benison on those little lakes!
Stone houses of refuge are much needed on the mountains over which the Crawford trail reaches the summit. They should always be provided with fagots for a fire, clean straw or boughs for a bed, and printed directions for the inexperienced traveller to follow. A fireplace, furnished with a crane and a kettle for heating water, would be absolute luxuries. Being done, this glorious promenade—the equal of which does not exist in New England—would be taken with confidence by numbers, instead of, as now, by the few. It is the appropriate pendant of the ascent from the Glen by the carriage-road, or from Fabyan’s by the railway. One can hardly pretend to have seen the mountains in their grandest aspects until he has threaded this wondrous picture-gallery, this marvellous hall of statues.[30]
While recrossing the plateau, from which Washington has the appearance of one mountain piled upon another, I suddenly came upon a dead sparrow in my path. Poor little fellow! he was too adventurous, and sunk on stiffening pinions beneath the frozen wind. Ten steps farther on a large brown butterfly flew up and fluttered cheerily along the path. Why, then, did the bird die and the butterfly live?
This mountain butterfly, which endured cold that the bird could not, has excited the attention of naturalists, it is said. The mountain is 6293 feet high, and the butterflies never descend below an elevation of about 5600 feet. Here they “disport during the month of July of every year,” thriving upon the scanty deposits of honey found in the flowers of the few species of hardy plants that grow in the crevices of the rocks at this great altitude, and upon other available liquid substances. The insect measures, from tip to tip of the expanded fore-wings, about one and eight-tenths inches. It is colored in shades of brown, with various bands and marblings diversifying the surface of the wings. The butterfly is known to naturalists as the Œneis semidea, and was first described, in 1828, by Thomas Say. An allied species occurs on Long’s Peak and other elevated heights in Colorado; and another is found at Hopedale, Labrador; but they are confined to these widely separated localities. It is surmised that the butterfly, like the Alpine flora, beautifully illustrates the presence, or rather the advance and retreat, of the glacier.
I took up the little winged chorister of the vale who was not able to make spring come to the mountain for all his warbling. Truly, was not the little bird’s fate typical of those ambitious climbers for fame who, chilled to death by neglect or indifference, die singing on the heights? So the sparrow’s fall gave me food for reflection, during which I reached the little circular enclosure at the foot of the cone.
Once more I climbed the rambling and rocky stairs leading to the summit; but long before reaching it clouds were drifting above and below me. The day was to end like so many others. The crabbed old mountain had exhausted his store of benevolence. I hurried on down the Glen road. After descending a mile I heard a rumbling sound, deep and prolonged, like distant thunder. The thought of being overtaken on the mountain by a thunder-storm made me quicken my pace almost to a run. On turning the corner where the snow-bank had lain, like a lion in the path, devoutly wishing myself well and safely over, I felt something rise in my throat. The bank was no longer there. Every vestige of it had disappeared, and, in all probability, its sudden plunge down the mountain was what I had taken for thunder. Ten minutes sooner and I should have been upon its treacherous bridge.
I passed the Half-Way House, entered the dusk forest, where the tree-tops were swaying wildly to and fro, the birds flitting silently, and the tall pines discordantly humming, as if getting the pitch of the storm. Suddenly it grew dark. A stream of fire blinded me with its glare. Then a deafening peal shook the solid earth. Another and another succeeded: Olympian salvos greeted the arrival of the storm king.
The rain was pattering among the leaves when I emerged into the open vale, guided by the lights of the Glen House shining through the darkness. My heavy feet almost refused to carry me farther, and I walked like the statue in “Don Juan.”