The first four miles are merely toilsome. It is only when emerging upon the bare crags above the woods that the wonders of the ascent begin, and the succession of views, dimly seen through my eyes in this chapter, challenges the attention at every step. There is one exception. About a mile up, the road issues upon a jutting spur of the mountain, from which the summit, with the house on the highest point, is seen in clear weather.
Suddenly I came out of the low firs, the scrubby growth of birches, upon the fear-inspiring desolation of the bared and wintry summit. The high sun poured down with dazzling brightness upon the white ledges, which, rising like a wall above the solitary cabin before me, thrust their jagged edges in the way, as if to forbid farther progress. Out of this glittering precipice dead trees thrust huge antlers. This formless mass overhanging the Half-Way House, known as The Ledge, is one of the most terrific sights of the journey.
Until clear of the woods, my uneasiness, inspired by the recollection of the ascent from Crawford’s, was extreme; but I now stood, in the full blaze of an unclouded sun, upon a treeless wilderness of rock, a gratified spectator of one of the most extraordinary scenes it has ever fallen to man’s lot to witness. But what a frightful silence! Not a murmur; not a rustling leaf; but all still as death. I was half-afraid.
At my feet yawned the measureless void of the Great Gulf, torn from the entrails of the mountain by Titanic hands. Above my head leaped up the endless pile of granite constituting the dome of Washington. It had now exchanged its gray cassock for pale green. All around was unutterable desolation. Crevassed with wide splits, encompassed round by lofty mountain walls, the gorge was at once fascinating and forbidding, grand yet terrible. The high-encircling steeps of Clay and Jefferson, Adams and Madison, enclosing it with one mighty sweep, ascended out of its depths and stretched along the sky, which seemed receding before their daring advance. Peering down into the abyss, where the tallest pines were shrubs and their trunks needles, the earth seemed split to its centre, and the feet of these mountains rooted in the midst. To confront such a spectacle unmoved one should be more, or less than human.
Looking backward over the forest through which I had come, the eye caught a blur of white and a gleam of blue in the Peabody Glen. The white was the hotel, the blue the river. Following the vale out to its entrance upon the Androscoggin meadows, the same swift messenger ascended Moriah, and, traversing the confederate peaks to the summit of Mount Carter, stopped short at its journey’s end.
As I slowly mounted the Ledge the same unnatural appearance was everywhere—the same wreck, same desolation, same discord. The dead cedars, bleaching all around, looked like an army of gigantic crabs crawling up the mountain side, which universal ruin overspread, and which even the soft sunshine rendered more ghastly and more solemn. I looked eagerly along the road; listened. Not a human being; not a sound. I was alone upon the mountain.
From here I no longer walked upon earth but on air. Respiration became more and more difficult. Not even a zephyr stirred, while the glare was painful to eyes already overtaxed in the endeavor to grasp the full meaning of this most unaccustomed scene. The road, steadily ascending, showed its zigzags far up the mountain. Now and then a rude receptacle had been dug, or rather built up, by the road-side, in which earth to mend the road was stored; and this soil, wholly composed of disintegrated rock, must be scraped from underneath the ledges, from crevices, from hollows, and husbanded with care. “As cheap as dirt,” was a saying without significance here. As I neared the summit the melting snows had, in many places, swept it bare, exposing the naked ledge; and here earth must be brought up from lower down the mountain. But the pains bestowed upon it equals the incessant demand for its preservation, and had I not seen with my own eyes I could scarcely have believed so excellent a specimen of road-making existed in this desert.
But how long will the mountain resist the denuding process constantly going on, and what repair the gradual but certain disintegration of the peak? It is a monument of human inability to act upon it in any way. Be it so. The snows, the frosts, the rains, pursue their work none the less surely. You see in the deep gullies, the avalanches of stones, the sands of the sea-shore—so many evidences of the forces which, sooner or later, will accomplish the miracle and remove the mountain.
From my next halting-place I perceived that I had been traversing a promontory of the mountain jutting boldly out into the Great Gulf, above the Half-Way House; and, looking down over the parapet-wall, a mile or more of the road uncoiled its huge folds, turning hither and thither, doubling upon itself like a bewildered serpent, and, like the serpent, always gaining a little on the mountain. This is one of the strangest sights of this strange journey; but, in order to appreciate it at its full value, one should be descending by the stage-coach, when the danger, more apparent than real, is intensified by the swift descent of the mountain into the gulf below, over which the traveller sees himself suspended with feelings more poignant than agreeable. The fact that there has never been a fatal accident upon the carriage-road speaks volumes for the caution and skill of the drivers; but, as one of the oldest and most experienced said to me, “There should be no fooling, no chaffing, and no drinking on that road.”[21]