The Crystal Cascade divides with Glen Ellis the honor of being the most beautiful water-fall of the White Mountains. And well may it claim this distinction. These two charming and radiant sisters have each their especial admirers, who come in multitudes every year, like pilgrims to the shrine of a goddess. In fact, they are as unlike as two human countenances. Every one is astonished at the changes effected by simple combinations of rocks, trees, and water. One shrinks from a critical analysis of what appeals so strangely to his human sympathies. Indeed, he should possess the language of a Dumas or a Ruskin, the poetry of a Longfellow or a Whittier, the pencil of a Turner or a Church, to do justice to this pre-eminently beautiful of cascades.
Look around. On the right bank of the stream, where a tall birch leans its forked branches out over the pool below, a jutting rock embraces in one glance the greater part of the fall. The cliffs, rising on both sides, make a most wild and impressive setting. The trees, which shade or partly screen it, exclude the light. The ferns and shrubbery trace their arabesques of foliage upon the cold, damp rocks. The sides of the mountain, receding into black shadows, seem set with innumerable columns, supporting a roof of dusky leafage. All this combines to produce the effect of standing under the vault of some old dimly-lighted cathedral—a subdued, a softened feeling. A voice seems whispering, “God is here!”
Through these sombre shades the cascade comes like a gleam of light: it redeems the solitude. High up, hundreds of feet up the mountain, it boils and foams; it hardly seems to run. How it turns and tosses, and writhes on its hard bed! The green leaves quiver at its struggles. Birds fly silently by. Down, down, and still down over its shattered stairs falls the doomed flood, until, lashed and broken into a mere feathery cloud, it reaches a narrow gorge between abrupt cliffs of granite. A little pellucid basin, half white, half black water, receives it in full career. It then flows out by a pretty water-fall of twenty feet more. But here, again, the sharp, wedge-shaped cliff, advancing from the opposite bank, compresses its whole volume within a deep and narrow trough, through which it flies with the rapidity of light, makes a right angle, and goes down the mountain, uttering loud complaints. From below, the jagged, sharp-edged cliff forms a kind of vestibule, behind which the cascade conceals itself. Behind this, farther back, is a rock, perfectly black, and smooth as polished ebony, over which the surplus water of the fall spreads a tangled web of antique lace. Some very curious work has been going on here since the stream first made its way through the countless obstacles it meets in the long miles to its secret fountains on Mount Washington. One carries away a delightful impression of the Crystal Cascade. To the natural beauty of falling water it brings the charm of lawless unrestraint. It scorns the straight and narrow path; has stolen interviews with secret nooks on this side or that; is forever coquettishly adjusting its beautiful dishabille. What power has taken one of those dazzling clouds, floating over the great summit, and pinned it to the mountain side, from which it strives to rise and soar away?
We are now in the wildest depths of the Pinkham defile. The road is gloomy enough, edging its way always through a dense wood around a spur of Mount Washington, which it closely hugs. Upon reaching the summit, thirteen hundred and fifty feet above the Saco, at Bartlett, a sign-board showed where to leave the highway, but now the noise of the fall coming clearer and clearer was an even surer guide.
The sense of seclusion is perfect. Stately pines, funereal cedars, sombre hemlocks, throng the banks, as if come to refresh their parched foliage with the fine spray ascending from the cataract. This spray sparkles in the sun like diamond-dust. Through the thick-set, clean-limbed tree-trunks jets of foam can be seen in mad riot along the rocky gorge. They leap, toss their heads, and tumble over each other like young lambs at play. Backward up the stream, downward beyond the fall, we see the same tumult of waters in the midst of statuesque immobility; we hear the roar of the fall echoing in the tops of the pines; we feel the dull earth throb with the superabundant energy of the wild river.
Making my way to the rocks above the cataract, I saw the torrent swiftly descending in two long, arching billows, flecked with foam, and tossing myriad diamonds to the sun. Two large masses of rock, loosened from the cliffs that hang over it, have dropped into the stream, turning it a little from its ancient course, but only to make it more picturesque and more tumultuous. On the left of the gorge the rocks are richly striped with black, yellow, and purple. The water is crystal clear, and cold as ice, having come, in less time than it takes to write, from the snows of Tuckerman’s Ravine. The variegated hues of the rocks, glistening with spray, of the water itself seizing and imprisoning, like flies in amber, every shadow these rocks let fall, the roar of the cataract, make a deep and abiding impression of savage force and beauty.
But I had not yet seen the fall. Descending by slippery stairs to the pool beneath it, I saw, eighty feet above me, the whole stream force its way through a narrow cleft, and stand in one unbroken column, superbly erect, upon the level surface of the pool. The sheet was as white as marble, the pool as green as malachite. As if stunned by the fall, it turns slowly round; then, recovering, precipitates itself down the rocky gorge with greater passion than ever.
On its upper edge the curling sheet of the fall was shot with sunlight, and shone with enchanting brilliancy. All below was one white, feathery mass, gliding down with the swift and noiseless movement of an avalanche of fresh snow. No sound until the moment of contact with the submerged rocks beneath; then it finds a voice that shakes the hoary forest to its centre. How this exquisite white thing fascinates! One has almost to tear himself away from the spot. Undine seems beckoning us to descend with her into the crystal grottoes of the pool. From the tender dalliance of a sunbeam with the glittering mists constantly ascending was born a pale Iris. Exquisitely its evanescent hues decorated the virgin drapery of the fall. Within these mists two airy forms sometimes discover themselves, hand-in-hand.
The story runs that the daughter of a sagamore inhabiting the little vale, now Jackson, was secretly wooed and won by a young brave of another and neighboring tribe. But the haughty old chief destined her for a renowned warrior of his own band. Mustering his friends, the preferred lover presented himself in the village, and, according to Indian usage, laying
“—at her father’s feet that night
His softest furs and wampum white.”