We had from the summit an inspiring though not an extensive view. A bank of dun-colored smoke smirched the fair western sky as high as the summits of the Green Mountains. At fifty miles mountains and valleys melted confusedly into each other. Water emitted only a dull glimmer. Here a peak and there a summit surveyed us from afar. All else was intangible; almost imaginary. At twenty-five miles the land, resuming its ordinary appearance, was bathed in the soft brilliance caused by the sun shining through an atmosphere only half transparent.
Upon this obscure mass we traced once more the well-known objects environing the great mountain. To the south Mount Washington divided the landscape in two. For some time we stood admiring its magnificent torso, its amplitude of rock-land, its easy preponderance over every other summit. Again we followed the road down the great north-east spur. Once more we caught the white specks which denote the line of the railway. We plunged our eyes down into the Great Gulf, and lifted them to the shattered protuberances of Clay, which seemed to mark the route where the glacier crushed and ground its way through the very centre of the chain. A second time we descended Jefferson to the deep dip, opening like a trough between two enormous sea-waves, where we first saw the little Storm Lake glistening. Following now the long, rocky ridge, rolling downward toward the hamlets of Jefferson and Randolph, the mountains yawned wide at our feet. We were looking over into King’s Ravine—to its very bottom. We peered curiously into its remotest depths, traced the difficult and breathless ascent through the remarkable natural gateway at its head out upon a second ridge, on which a little pond (Star Lake) lies hid. We then crossed the gap communicating with Mount Madison, whose summit, last and lowest of the great northern peaks, dominates the Androscoggin Valley with undisputed sway. To-day it made on us scarcely an impression. Its peak, which from the valley holds a rough similitude with that of Adams, is dwarfed here. You look down upon it.
More applicable to Adams than to any other, for our eyes grow dazzled with the glitter and sparkle of countless mica-flakes incrusting the hard granite with clear brilliancy as from the facets of a diamond; more applicable, again, from the stern, unconquerable attitude of the great gray shaft itself, lifted in such conscious pride beyond the confines of the vast ethereal vault of blue—a tower of darkness invading the bright realms of light; a defiance flung by earth in the face of high heaven—is the magnificent description of the Matterhorn from the pen of Ruskin:
“If one of these little flakes of mica-sand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth’s atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen—what would it have thought had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower;—that against it—poor, helpless mica-flake!—the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it—weak, wave-drifted mica-flake!—the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one, as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire!”
Myself and my companions set out on our return to the Summit House early in the afternoon, choosing this time the ridge in preference to the scrubby slope. From this we turned away, at the end of half an hour, by an obscure path leading to a boggy pool, sunk in a mossy hollow underneath it, crossed the area of scattered bowlders, strewn all around like the relics of a petrified tempest, and, filling our cups at the spring, drank to Mount Adams, the paragon of mountain peaks.
As we again approached the brow of Mount Washington the sun resembled a red-hot globe of iron flying through the west and spreading a conflagration through the heavens. Again the colossal shadow of the mountain began its stately ascension in the east. One moment the burning eye of the great luminary interrogated this phantom, sprung from the loins of the hoary peak. Then it dropped heavily down behind the Green Mountains, as it has done for thousands of years, the landscape fading, fading into one vast, shadowy abyss, out of which arose the star-lit dome of the august summit.
TOURIST’S APPENDIX.
PREPARED FOR “THE HEART OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.”
GEOGRAPHY.—The White Mountains are in the northern central part of the State of New Hampshire. They occupy the whole area of the State between Maine and Vermont, and between Lake Winnipiseogee and the head-streams of the Connecticut and Androscoggin rivers.
Two principal chains, having a general direction from south-west to north-east, constitute this great water-shed of New England. These are the Franconia and the White Mountains proper, sometimes called the “Presidential Range.”
Grouped on all sides of the higher summits are a great number of inferior ridges, among which, as in the Sandwich Range, rise some very fine peaks, widely extending the mountainous area, and diversifying it with numerous valleys, lakes, and streams.