“I feel I shall remember your mountains to the last day of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself; which he finds out when he leaves the lady.”
Notwithstanding their prepossessions against nature, and their undisguised preference for the smoke and dirt of London, the mountains awoke something in these two men which was apparently a revelation of themselves unto themselves. I have felt a higher respect for both since I knew that they loved mountains, as I pity those who have only seen heaven through the smoke of the city. It is not easy to explain two ideas so essentially opposite as are presented in the earlier and later declarations of these widely famous authors, unless we agree, keeping “Elia’s” odd simile in mind, that in the first case they should, like woman, be taken, not at what she says, but what she means.
The Flume House is the proper tarrying-place for an investigation of the mountain gorge from which it derives both its custom and its name. It is also placed opposite to the Pool, another of those natural wonders with which the pass is crowded, and which tempt us at every step to turn aside from the travelled road.
Fronting the hotel is a belt of woods, with two massive mountains rising behind. In the concealment of these woods the Pemigewasset, contracted to a modest stream, runs along the foot of the mountains. A rough, zigzag path leads through the woods to the river and to the Pool. Now raise the eyes to the summit-ridge of yonder mountain. The peak finely reproduces the features of a gigantic human face, while the undulations of the ridge fairly suggest a recumbent human figure wrapped in a shroud. The outlines of the forehead and nose are curiously like the profile of Washington; hence the colossal figure is called Washington Lying in State. This immortal sculpture gave rise to the idea that the tomb of Washington, like that of Desaix, on the St. Bernard, should be on the great summit that bears his name.
From the Flume House I looked up through the deep cleft of the Notch—an impressive vista. To the left is Cannon, or Profile Mountain; to the right the beetling crags of Eagle Cliff; then the pointed, shapely peaks of Lafayette; and so the range continues breaking off and off, bending away into lesser mountains that finally melt into pale-blue shadows. Now a stray cloud atop a peak gives it a volcanic character. Now a puff scatters it like thistle-down. It is a sultry summer’s morning, and banks of film hang like huge spider’s-webs in the tree-tops. Soon they detach themselves, and, floating lazily upward, are seized by a truant breeze, spun mischievously round, and then settle quietly down on the highest peaks like young eaglets on their nest.
Let us first walk down to the Pool. This Pool is a caprice of the river. Imagine a cistern, deeply sunk in granite, receiving at one end a weary cascade, which seems to crave a moment’s rest before hurrying on down the rocky pass. In the mystery and seclusion of ages, and with only the rude implements picked up by the way, the river has hollowed a basin a hundred feet wide and forty deep out of the stubborn rock. Without doubt Nature thus first taught us to cut the hardest marble with sand and water. Cliffs traversed by cracks rise a hundred feet higher. The water is a glossy and lustrous sea-green, and of such marvellous transparency that you see the brilliant pebbles sparkling at the bottom, shifting with the waves of light like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Overtopping trees lean timidly over and peer down into the Pool, which coldly repulses their shadows. Only the colorless hue of the rocks is reflected; and the stranger, seeing an old man with a gray beard standing erect in a boat, has no other idea than that he has arrived on the borders and is to be accosted by the ferryman of Hades.
The Flume is reached by going down the road a short distance, and then diverging to the left and crossing the river to the Flume Brook. A carriage-way conducts almost to the entrance of the gorge. Then begins an easy and interesting promenade up the bed of the brook.
This is a remarkable rock-gallery, driven several hundred feet into the heart of the mountain, through which an ice-cold brook rushes. The miracle of Moses seems repeated here sublimely. Some unknown power smote the rock, and the prisoned stream gushed forth free and lightsome as air. You approach it over broad ledges of freckled granite, polished by the constant flow of a thin, pellucid sheet of water to slippery smoothness. Proceeding a short distance up this natural esplanade, you enter a damp and gloomy fissure between perpendicular walls, rising seventy feet above the stream, and, on lifting your eyes suddenly, espy an enormous bowlder tightly wedged between the cliffs. Now try to imagine a force capable of grasping the solid rock and dividing it in halves as easily as you would an apple with your two hands.
