Continuing to ascend, the road once more took a different direction, curving around that side of the mountain rising above the Pinkham forest. This détour brought the Carter chain upon my left, instead of on my right.
Thus far I had encountered little snow, though the rocks were everywhere crusted with ice; but now a sudden turning brought me full upon an enormous bank, completely blocking the road, which here skirted the edge of a high precipice. Had a sentinel suddenly barred my way with his bayonet, I could not have been more astonished. I was brought to a dead stand. I looked over the parapet, then at the snow-bank, then at the mountain. The first look made me shudder, the second thoughtful, the third gave me a headache.
At this spot the side of the mountain was only a continuation of the precipice, bent slightly backward from the perpendicular, and ascending several hundred feet higher. The snow, extending a hundred feet or more above, and conforming nearly with the slope of the mountain, filled the road for thrice that distance. I saw that it was only prevented from sliding into the valley by the low wall of loose stones at the edge of the road; but how long would that resist the great pressure upon it? The snow-bank had already melted at its edges, so that I could crawl some distance underneath, and hear the drip of water above and below, showing that it was being steadily undermined. In fact, the whole mass seemed on the point of precipitating itself over the precipice. I could neither go around it nor under it; so much was certain.
What to do? I had only a strong umbrella, the inseparable companion of my mountain jaunts, and the glacier was as steep as a roof. What assurance was there that if I ventured upon it the whole sheet, dislodged by my weight, might not be shot off the mountain side, carrying me with it to the bottom of the abyss? But while I felt no desire to add mine to the catalogue of victims already claimed by the mountain, the idea of being turned back was inadmissible. Native caution put the question, “Will you?” and native persistency answered, “I will.”
When a thing is to be done, the best way is to do it. I therefore tried the snow, and, finding a solid foothold, resolved to venture; had it been soft, I should not have dared. Using my umbrella as an alpenstock, I crossed on the parapet, where the declivity was the least, and without accident, but slowly and breathlessly, until near the opposite side, when I passed the intervening space in two bounds, alighting in the road with the blood tingling to my fingers’ ends.
A sharp turn around a ledge, and the south-east wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine rose up, like a wraith, out of the forest. Nearer at hand was the head of Huntington’s, while to the right the cone of Washington loomed grandly more than a thousand feet higher. A little to the left you look down into the gloomy depths of the Pinkham defile, the valley of Ellis River, the Saco Valley to North Conway, where the familiar figure of Kearsarge is the presiding genius. The blue course of the Ellis, which is nothing but a long cascade, the rich green of the Conway intervales, the blanched peak of Chocorua, the sapphire summits of the Ossipee Mountains, were presented in conjunction with the black and humid walls of the ravine, and the iron-gray mass of the great dome. The crag on which I stood leans out over the mountain like a bastion, from which the spectator sees the deep-intrenched valleys, the rivers which wash the feet of the monarch, and the long line of summits which partake his grandeur while making it all the more impressive.[22]
Turning now my back upon the Glen, the way led in the opposite direction, and began to look over the depression between Clay and Jefferson into the world of blue peaks beyond. From here the striking spectacle of the four great northern peaks, their naked summits, their sides seamed with old and new slides, and flecked with snow, constantly enlarged. There were some terrible rents in the side of Clay, red as half-closed wounds; in one place the mountain seemed cloven to its centre. It was of this gulf that the first climber said it was such a precipice he could scarce discern to the bottom. The rifts in the walls of the ravine, the blasted fir-trees leaning over the abyss, and clutching the rocks with a death-gripe, the rocks themselves, tormented, formidable, impending, astound by their vivid portrayal of the formless, their suggestions of the agony in which these mountains were brought forth.
I was now fairly upon the broad, grass-grown terrace at the base of the pinnacle, sometimes called the Cow Pasture. The low peak rising upon its limits is a monument to the fatal temerity of a traveller who, having climbed, as he supposed, to the top of the mountain, died from hunger or exposure, or from both, at this inhospitable spot.[23] A skeleton in rags was found, at the end of a year, huddled under some rocks. Farther down the mountain a heap of stones indicates the place where Doctor Ball, of Boston, was found by the party sent in search of him, famished, exhausted, and almost delirious. When rescued, he had passed two nights upon the mountain, without food, fire, or shelter, after as many days of fruitless wandering up and down, always led astray by his want of knowledge, and mocked by occasional glimpses of snowy peaks above, or the distant Glen below. More dead than alive, he was supported down the mountain as far as the camp at The Ledge, whence he was able to ride to the Glen House. His reappearance had the effect of one risen from the dead. In reality, the rescuing party took up with them materials for a rude bier, expecting to find a dead body stiffening in the snow.[24]
Besides this almost unheard of resistance to hunger, cold, and exhaustion combined, and notwithstanding the fortitude which enabled the lost man to continue his desperate struggle for life until rescued, all would doubtless have been to no purpose without the aid of an umbrella, which, by a lucky chance, he took at setting out. This umbrella was his only protection during the two terrible vigils he made upon the mountain. How, is related in the chapter on the ascent from Crawford’s.
Crossing the terrace, where even the road seems glad to rest after its laborious climb of seven miles, and where the traveller may also relax his efforts, preparatory to his arduous advance up the pinnacle, I came upon the railway, still solidly embedded in snow and ice.