“Gad!” muttered the colonel, wiping his forehead, “I was dreaming of old times; I declare I thought the mountain had got our range, and was shelling us.”
“Salmis of partridge; sauce aux champignons,” said George, licking his lips, and looking wistfully after the birds. You see, one spoke from the head, the other from the stomach.
Half an hour’s steady tramp brought us to an abandoned camp, where travellers formerly passed the night. A long stretch of corduroy road, and we were in the region of resinous trees. Here it was like going up rickety stairs, the mossed and sodden logs affording only a treacherous foothold. Evidence that we were nearing the summit was on all sides. Patches of snow covered the ground and were lodged among the branches. From these little runlets made their way into the path, as the most convenient channel. There were many dead pines, having their curiously distorted limbs hung with the long gray lichen called “old man’s beard.” Multitudes of great trees, prostrated by the wind, lay rotting along the ground, or had lodged in falling, constituting a woful picture of wreck and ruin. Here was not only the confusion and havoc of a primitive forest, untouched by the axe, but the battle-ground of ages, where frost, fire, and flood had steadily and pitilessly beaten the forest back in every desperate effort made to scale the summit. Prone upon the earth, stripped naked, or bursting their bark, the dead trees looked like fallen giants despoiled of their armor, and left festering upon the field. But we advanced to a scene still more weird.
The last mile gives occasional glimpses into the Ammonoosuc Valley, of Fabyan’s, of the hamlet at the base of Washington, and of the mountains between Fabyan’s and Jefferson. The last half-mile is a steady planting of one foot before another up the ledges. We left the forest for a scanty growth of firs, rooted among enormous rocks, and having their branches pinned down to their sides by snow and ice. The whole forest had been seized, pinioned, and cast into a death-like stupor. Each tree seemed to keep the attitude in which it was first overtaken; each silvered head to have dropped on its breast at the moment the spell overcame it. Perpetual imprisonment rewarded the temerity of the forest for thus invading the dominion of the Ice King. There it stood, all glittering in its crystal chains!
But as we threaded our way among these trees, still as statues, the sun came valiantly to the rescue. A warm breath fanned our cheeks and traversed the ice-locked forest. Instantly a thrill ran along the mountain. Quick, snapping noises filled the air. The trees burst their fetters in a trice. Myriad crystals fluttered overhead, or fell tinkling on the rocks at our feet. Another breath, and tree after tree lifted its bowed head gracefully erect. The forest was free.
George, who began by asking every few rods how much farther it was, now repeated the question for the fiftieth time; but we paid no attention.
We now entered a sort of liliputian forest, not higher than the knee, but which must have presented an almost insuperable barrier to early explorers of the mountain. In fact, as they could neither go through it nor around it, they must have walked over it, the thick-matted foliage rendering this the only alternative. No one could tell how long these trees had been growing, when a winter of unheard-of severity destroyed them all, leaving only their skeletons bleaching in the sun and weather. Wrenched, twisted, and made to grow the wrong way by the wind, the branches resembled the cast-off antlers of some extinct race of quadrupeds which had long ago resorted to the top of the mountain. The girdle of blasted trees below was piteous, but this was truly a strange spectacle. Indeed, the pallid forehead of the mountain seemed wearing a crown of thorns.
Getting clear of the dwarf-trees, or knee-wood, as it is called in the Alps, we ran quickly up the bare summit ledge. The transition from the gloom and desolation below into clear sunshine and free air was almost as great as from darkness to light. We lost all sense of fatigue; we felt only exultation and supreme content.
Here we were, we three, more than four thousand feet above the sea, confronted by an expanse so vast that no eye but an eagle’s might grasp it, so thronged with upstarting peaks as to confound and bewilder us out of all power of expression. One feeling was uppermost—our own insignificance. We were like flies on the gigantic forehead of an elephant.
However, we had climbed and were astride the ridge-pole of New England. The rains which beat upon it descend on one side to the Atlantic, on the other to Long Island Sound. The golden sands which are the glory of the New England coast have been borne, atom by atom, grain by grain, from this grand laboratory of Nature; and if you would know the source of her great industries, her wealth, her prosperity, seek it along the rivers which are born of these skies, cradled in these ravines, and nourished amid the tangled mazes of these impenetrable forests. How, like beautiful serpents, their sources lie knotted and coiled in the heart of these mountains! How lovingly they twine about the feet of the grand old hills! Too proud to bear its burdens, they create commerce, building cities, scattering wealth as they run on. No barriers can stay, no chains fetter their free course. They laugh and run on.