I recall no mountain-path that is so richly diversified with all the wildest forms of mountain beauty. At first our progress through primitive groves of pine, hemlock, and birch was impeded by nothing more remarkable than the giant trees stretching interminably, rank upon rank, tier upon tier. But these woods, these countless gray and black and white trunks, and outspread framework of branches, supported a canopy of thick foliage, filled with voices innumerable. Something stirred in the top of a lofty pine; and then, like an alguazil on a watch-tower, a crow, apparent sentinel of all the feathered colony, rose clumsily on his talons, flapped two sable wings, and thrice hoarsely challenged, “Caw! caw! caw!” What clamor, what a liliputian Babel ensued! Our ears fairly tingled with the calls, outcries, and objurgations apparently flung down at us by the multitudinous population overhead. Hark to the woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat, the partridge’s muffled drum! List to the bugle of the wood-thrush, sweet and clear! Now sounds the cat-bird’s shrill alarm, the owl’s hoot of indignant surprise. Then the squirrels, those little monkeys of our northern woods, grated their teeth sharply at us, and let fall nuts on our heads as we passed underneath. Never were visitors more unwelcome.
Before long we came to a brook, then to another. Their foaming waters shot past like a herd of wild horses. These we crossed. We now began to thread a region where the forest was more open. The moss we trampled underfoot, and which here replaces the grass of the valleys, was beating the tallest trees in the race for the mountain-top. It was the old story of the tortoise and the hare over again. But this moss: have you ever looked at it before your heel bruised the perfumed flowers springing from its velvet? Here are tufts exquisitely decorated with coral lichens; here the violet and anemone nestle lovingly together; here it creeps up the gray trunks, or hides the bare roots of old trees. Tread softly! This is the abode of elves and fairies. Step lightly! you expect to hear the crushed flowers cry out with pain.
These enchanting spots, where stones are couches and trees canopies, tempted us to sit down on a cushioned bowlder, or throw ourselves upon the thick carpet into which we sunk ankle-deep at every step. Even the bald, gray rocks were tapestried with mosses, lichens, and vines. All around, under the thick shade, hundreds of enormous trees lay rotting; yet exquisitely the prostrate trunks were overspread with robes of softest green, effectually concealing the repulsiveness, the suggestions of decay. Now and then the dead tree rose into new life through the sturdy roots of a young fir, or luxuriant, plumed ferns growing in its bark. This inexpressible fecundity, in the midst of inexpressible wastefulness, declared that for Nature there is no such thing as death. And they tell us the day of miracles has passed! Upon this dream of elf-land the cool morning light fell in oblique streams through the tree-trunks, as through grated windows, filling all the wood with a subdued twilight glimmer, leaving a portion of its own gleams on the moss-grown rocks, while the trees stretched their black shadows luxuriously along the thick-piled sward, like weary soldiers in a bivouac.
We proceeded thus from chamber to chamber, and from cloister to cloister, at times descending some spur of the mountain into a deep-shaded dell, and again climbing a swift and miry slope to better ground, until we crossed the stream coming from the high spur spoken of. From here the ground rapidly rose for half a mile more, when we suddenly came out of the low firs full upon the Lion’s Head crag, rising above Hermit Lake, and visible from the vicinity of the Glen House. To be thus unexpectedly confronted by this wall of imperishable rock stirs one very deeply. For the moment it dominates us, even as it does the little tarn so unconsciously slumbering at its feet. It is horribly mutilated and defaced. Its sides are thickly sowed with stunted trees, that bury their roots in its cracks and rents with a gripe of iron. In effect it is the barbican of the great ravine. Crouched underneath, by the shore of the lake, is a matted forest of firs and spruces, dwindled to half their usual size, grizzled with long lichens, and occupying, as if by stealth, the debatable ground between life and death. It is, in fact, more dead than alive. Deeply sunk beneath is the lake.
Hermit Lake—a little pool nestling underneath a precipice—demands a word. Its solitary state, its waters green and profound, and the thick shades by which it was covered, seemed strangely at variance with the intense activity of the foaming torrents we had seen, and could still hear rushing down the mountain. It was too small for a lake, or else it was dwarfed by the immense mass of overshadowing rock towering above it, whose reflected light streamed across its still and glossy surface. Here we bid farewell to the forest.
We had now gained a commanding post of observation, though there was yet rough work to do. We saw the whole magnificent sweep of the ravine, to where it terminates in a semicircle of stupendous cliffs that seem hewn perpendicularly a thousand feet down. Lying against the western wall we distinguished patches of snow; but they appeared of trifling extent. Great wooded mountain slopes stretched away from the depths of the gorge on either side, making the iron lineaments of the giant cliffs seem harder by their own softness and delicacy. Here and there these exquisite draperies were torn in long rents by land-slips. In the west arose the shattered peak of Monroe—a mass of splintered granite, conspicuous at every point for its irreclaimable deformity. It seemed as if the huge open maw of the ravine might swallow up this peak with ease. There was a Dantesque grandeur and solemnity everywhere. With our backs against the trees, we watched the bellying sails of a stray cloud which intercepted in its aerial voyage our view of the great summit; but it soon floated away, discovering the whitish-gray ledges to the very capstone of the dome itself. Looking down and over the thick woods beyond, we met again the burly Carter Mountains, pushed backward from the Pinkham Notch, and kept back by an invisible yet colossal strength.
From Hermit Lake the only practicable way was by clambering up the bed of the mountain brook that falls through the ravine. The whole expanse that stretched on either side was a chaos of shattered granite, pitched about in awful confusion. Path there was none. No matter what way we turned, “no thoroughfare” was carved in stolid stone. We tried to force a passage through the stunted cedars that are mistaken at a mile for greensward, but were beaten back, torn and bleeding, to the brook. We then turned to the great bowlders, to be equally buffeted and abused, and finally repulsed upon the brook, which seemed all the while mocking our efforts. Once, while forcing a route, inch by inch, through the scrub, I was held suspended over a deep crevice, by my belt, until extricated by my comrade. At another time he disappeared to the armpits in a hole, from which I drew him like a blade from a scabbard. At this moment we found ourselves unable either to advance or retreat. The dwarf trees squeezed us like a vise. Who would have thought there was so much life in them? At our wits’ end, we looked at our bleeding hands, then at each other. The brook was the only clew to such a labyrinth, and to it, as from Scylla to Charybdis, we turned as soon as we recovered breath. But to reach it was no easy matter; we had literally to cut our way out of the jungle.