Each choosing a route for himself, we pushed on to the high summit of Clay, from which we looked down into the deep gap dividing this mountain from Jefferson. Arrived there, we resolutely attacked the eastern slopes of this fine peak, whose notched summit rose more than seven hundred and fifty feet above our heads. Patches of Alpine grasses, of reindeer-moss, interspersed with irregular ridges of stones, extended quite up to the summit, which was a mere elongated stone-heap crowning the apex of its cone. Those undulating masses encircling its bulk, half hid among the grass, were like an immense python crushing the mountain in its deadly folds. We picked our way carefully among this chaotic débris, which the Swiss aptly call “cemeteries of the devil,” tripping now and then in the long, wiry grass, or burying our feet among the hummocks of dry moss, which were so many impediments to rapid progress. This appearance and this experience were common to the whole route.
At each summit we threw ourselves upon the ground, to feast upon the landscape while regaining breath. Each halt developed more and more the grand and stupendous mass of Washington receding from the depths of the Great Gulf, along whose edge the carriage-road serpentined and finally disappeared. We saw, a little softened by distance, the horribly mutilated crags of the head wall stripped bare of all verdure, presenting on its knobbed agglomerates of tempest-gnawed granite a thousand eye-catching points and detaining as many shadows. Nothing—not even the glittering leagues of mountains and valleys shooting or slumbering above, beneath—so riveted the attention as this apparently bottomless pit of the five mountains. It was a continued wonder. It drew us by a strange magnetism to its dizzy brink, chained us there, and then abandoned us to a physical and moral vertigo, in which the power of critical investigation was lost. An invisible force seemed always dragging us toward it. Whence comes this horrible, this uncontrollable desire to throw ourselves in?
Out of the death-like torpor which eternally shrouds the ravine the smiling valley seems escaping. The crystal air of the heights grows thick in its depths. Beasts and birds of prey haunt its gloomy solitudes. An immense grave seems yawning to receive the mountains. The aged mountains seem standing with one foot in the grave.
This gulf makes an impression altogether different from the others. It is an immense ravine. Each of the five mountains pushes down into it massive buttresses of granite, forming lesser ravines between of considerable extent. Through these streams trickle down from invisible sources. But these buttresses, which fall lightly and gracefully as folds of velvet from summit to base of the highest mountains, these ravines, are hardly noticed. The insatiable maw of the gulf swallows them as easily as an anaconda a rabbit. In immensity, which you do not easily grasp, in grandeur, which you do not know how to measure, this has no partakers here. Even the great Carter Mountain, rising from the Peabody Valley, seems no more than a stone rolled away from the entrance of this enormous sepulchre.
Our first difficulties were encountered upon the reverse of Mount Jefferson, from whose side rocky spurs detached themselves, and, jutting out from the side of the mountain, formed an irregular line of cliffs of varying height, in the way we had selected for the descent. But these were no great affair. We now had the Ravine of the Castles upon our left, the stately pyramid of Adams in front, and, beneath, the deep hollow between this mountain and the one we were descending. We had the little hamlet of East Jefferson at the mouth of the ravine, and that crowd of peaks, tightly wedged between the waters of the Connecticut and the Androscoggin, looming above it.
A deviation to the left enabled us to approach the Castellated Ridge, which is, beyond dispute, the most extraordinary rock-formation the whole extent of the range can show. As it is then fully before you, it is seen to much better advantage when approached from Mount Adams. I do not know who gave it this name, but none could be more felicitous or expressive. It is a sloping ridge of red-brown granite, broken at its summit into a long line of picturesque towers and battlements, rising threateningly over an escarpment of débris. Such an illusion is too rarely encountered to be easily forgotten. It is hardly possible to doubt you are really looking at an antique ruin. One would like to wander among these pre-Adamite fortifications, which curiously remind him of the old Spanish fortresses among the Pyrenees. From the opposite side of the ravine—for I had not the time requisite for a closer examination—the rock composing the most elevated portion of the ridge appears to have been split perpendicularly down, probably by frost, allowing these broken columns and shafts to stand erect upon the verge of the abyss. In the warm afternoon light, when the shadows fall, it is hardly possible to conceive a finer picture of a crumbling but still formidable mountain fortress. Bastions and turrets stand boldly out. Each broken shaft sends a long shadow streaming down into the ravine, whose high and deeply-furrowed sides are thus beautifully striped with dusk-purple, while the sunlit parts retain a greenish-gray.
At the foot of Jefferson we found, concealed among rushes, a spring, which refreshed us like wells of the desert the parched and fainting Arab. From here two routes offered themselves. One was by keeping the curved ridge, rising gradually to a subordinate peak (Samuel Adams),[44] and to the foot of the summit itself; a second was by crossing the ground sloping downward from this ridge into the Great Gulf. We chose the latter, notwithstanding the dwarf-spruce, advancing well up to the foot of the ridge, promised a warm reception.
At last, after sustaining a vigorous tussle with the scrub-firs, and stopping to unearth a brook whose waters purred underneath stones, I stood at the foot of the pointed shaft I had so often seen wedged into the sky. Five hundred feet or more of the apex of this pyramid is apparently formed of broken rocks, dropped one by one into place. Nothing like a ledge or a cliff is to be seen: only these ponderous, sharp-edged masses of cold gray stone, lifted one above another to the tapering point. Up this mutilated pyramid we began a slow advance. It was necessary to carefully choose one step before taking another, in order to avoid plunging into the deep crevasses traversing the peak in every direction. At last I placed my foot upon the topmost crag.
No one can help regarding this peak with the open admiration which is its due. You conceive that every mountain ought to have a pinnacle. Well, here it is. We could easily have stood astride the culminating point. But how came these rocks here? and what was the primitive structure, if these fragments we see are its relics? One hardly believes that an ice-raft could have first transported and then deposited such misshapen masses in their present symmetrical form. Still less does he admit that the original shaft, crushed in a thousand pieces by the glacier itself, fell with such grace as to rise again, as he now sees it, from its own ruins. If, again, it proceeds from the eternal hammering of King Frost, what was the antique edifice that first rose so proudly above the frozen seas of the great primeval void? But to science the things which belong to science. We have a book describing heaven, but not one that resolves the problems of earth. The “Veni, vidi, vici,” of the Book of Genesis leaves us at the beginning. We are still staring, still questioning, still vacillating between this theory and that hypothesis.[45]