Seeing me ready, Davis whistled to his dog, and we entered the logging-road in Indian file. We at once took a brisk pace, which in a short time brought us to the edge of a clearing, now badly overgrown with bramble and coppice, and showing how easily nature obliterates the mark of civilization when left alone. In this clearing an old cellar told its sad story but too plainly. Those pioneers who first struck the axe into the noble pines here are all gone. They abandoned in consternation the effort to wring a scanty subsistence from this inhospitable and unfruitful region. Even the poor farms I had seen encroaching upon the skirts of this wilderness seemed fighting in retreat.
We quickly came to a second opening, where the axe of God had smote the forest still more ruthlessly than that of man. The ground was encumbered with half-burnt trees, among which the gaudy fire-weed grew rank and tall. Divining my thought, the guide explained in his quaint, sententious way, “Fire went through it; then the wind harricaned it down.” A comprehensive sweep of his staff indicated the area traversed by the whirlwind of fire and the tornado. This opening disclosed at our left the gray cliffs and yawning aperture of the Notch—by far the most satisfactory view yet obtained, and the nearest.
Burying ourselves in deeper solitudes, broken only by the hound in full cry after a fox or a rabbit, we descended to the banks of the Wildcat at a point one and a half miles from the road we had left. We then crossed the rude bridge of logs, keeping company with the gradually diminishing river, now upon one bank, now on the other, making a gradual ascent along with it, frequently pausing in mid-stream to glance up and down through the beautiful vistas it has cut through the trees. Halt at the third crossing, traveller, and take in the long course through the avenue of black, moss-draped firs! one so sombre and austere, the other gliding so bright and blithesome out of its shadow and gloom. Just above this spot a succession of tiny water-falls comes like a procession of nymphs out of an enchanted wood.
We were now in a colder region. The sparseness of the timber led me to look right and left for the stumps of felled trees, but I saw nothing of the kind. To the rigorous climate and extreme leanness of the soil they attribute the scanty, undersized growth. I did not see fifty good timber trees along the whole route. Where a large tree had been prostrated by the wind, its upturned and matted roots showed a pitiful quantity of earth adhering. Finding it impossible to grow downward more than a few poor inches, they spread themselves laterally out to a great distance. But the fir, with its flame-shaped point, is a symbol of indomitable pluck. You see it standing erect on the top of some huge bowlder, which its strong, thick roots clutch like a vulture’s talons. How came it there? Look at those rotting trunks, so beautifully covered with the lycopodium and partridge-plum! The seed of a fir has taken root in the bark. A tiny tree is already springing from the rich mould. As it grows, its roots grasp whatever offers a support; and if the decaying tree has fallen across a bowlder, they strike downward into the soil beneath it, and the rock is a prisoner during the lifetime of the tree. Its resin protects it from the icy blasts of winter, and from the alternate freezing and thawing of early spring. It is emphatically the tree of the mountains.
An hour and a half of pretty rapid walking brought us to the bottom of a steep rise. We were at length come to close quarters with the formidable outworks of Wildcat Mountain. The brook has for some distance poured a stream of the purest water over moss of the richest green, but now it most mysteriously vanishes from sight. From this point the singular rock called the Pulpit is seen overhanging the upper crags of the Dome.[18]
We drank a cup of delicious water from a spring by the side of the path, and, finding direct access forbidden by the towering and misshapen mass before us, turned sharply to the left, and attacked the side of Wildcat Mountain. We had now attained an altitude of nearly three thousand feet above the sea, or two thousand two hundred and fifty above the village of Jackson; we were more than a thousand higher than the renowned Crawford Notch.
On every side the ground was loaded down with huge gray bowlders, so ponderous that it seemed as if the solid earth must give way under them. Some looked as if the merest touch would send them crashing down the mountain. Undermined by the slow action of time, these fragments have fallen one by one from the high cliffs, and accumulated at the base. Among these the path serpentined for half a mile more, bringing us at last to the summit of the spur we had been climbing, and to the broad entrance of the Notch. We passed quickly over the level ground we were upon, stopped by the side of a well-built cabin of bark, threw off our loads, and then, fascinated by the exceeding strangeness of everything around me, I advanced to the edge of the scrubby growth in front of the camp, in order to command an unobstructed view.
Shall I live long enough to forget this sublime tragedy of nature, enacted Heaven knows when or how? How still it was! I seemed to have arrived at the instant a death-like silence succeeds the catastrophe. I saw only the bare walls of a temple, of which some Samson had just overthrown the columns—walls overgrown with a forest, ruins overspread with one struggling for existence.
Imagine the light of a mid-day sun brightening the tops of the mountains, while within a sepulchral gloom rendered all objects—rocks, trees, cliffs—all the more weird and fantastic. I was between two high mountains, whose walls enclose the pass. Overhanging it, fifteen hundred feet at least, the sunburnt crags of the Dome towered above the highest precipices of the mountain behind me. These stately barriers, at once so noble and imposing, seemed absolutely indestructible. Impossible to conceive anything more enduring than this imperishable rock. So long as the world stands, those mountains will stand. And nothing can shake this conviction. They look so strong, so confident in their strength, so incapable of change.