Nine hundred miles had carried me now to that spot. The afternoon was clear and fine; the great range had not a cloud to darken the glare of the sun upon its sheen of snow; and the pure cool air came over the forest trees fresh from the thousand billows of this sea of mountains. The two men went on to the portage end; I gave them my horse, and, turning at right angles into a wood, made my way towards the foot of the Buffalo’s Head.
Thick with brulé and tangled forest lay the base of the mountain; but this once passed, the steep sides became clear of forest, and there rose abruptly before me a mass of yellow grass and soft-blue anemones. Less than an hour’s hard climbing brought me to the summit, and I was a thousand times repaid for the labour of the ascent.
I stood on the bare rocks which formed the frontlet of the Buffalo’s Head. Below, the pines of a vast forest looked like the toy-trees which children set up when Noah is put forth to watch the animals emerging from his ark, and where everything is in perfect order, save and except that perverse pig, who will insist on lying upon his side in consequence of a fractured leg, and who must either be eliminated from the procession altogether, or put in such close contact to Mrs. Noah, for the sake of her support, as to detract very much from the solemnity of the whole procession.
Alas, how futile is it to endeavour to describe such a view! Not more wooden are the ark animals of our childhood, than the words in which man would clothe the images of that higher nature which the Almighty has graven into the shapes of lonely mountains! Put down your wooden woods bit by bit; throw in colour here, a little shade there, touch it up with sky and cloud, cast about it that perfume of blossom or breeze, and in Heaven’s name what does it come to after all? Can the eye wander away, away, away until it is lost in blue distance as a lark is lost in blue heaven, but the sight still drinks the beauty of the landscape, though the source of the beauty be unseen, as the source of the music which falls from the azure depths of sky.
That river coming out broad and glittering from the dark mountains, and vanishing into yon profound chasm with a roar which reaches up even here—billowy seas of peaks and mountains beyond number away there to south and west—that huge half dome which lifts itself above all others sharp and clear cut against the older dome of heaven! Turn east, look out into that plain—that endless plain where the pine-trees are dwarfed to spear-grass and the prairie to a meadow-patch—what do you see? Nothing, poor blind reader, nothing, for the blind is leading the blind; and all this boundless range of river and plain, ridge and prairie, rocky precipice and snow-capped sierra, is as much above my poor power of words, as He who built this mighty nature is higher still than all.
Ah, my friend, my reader! Let us come down from this mountain-top to our own small level again. We will upset you in an ice-rapid; Kalder will fire at you; we will be wrecked; we will have no food; we will hunt the moose, and do anything and everything you like,—but we cannot put in words the things that we see from these lonely mountain-tops when we climb them in the sheen of evening. When you go into your church, and the organ rolls and the solemn chant floats through the lofty aisles, you do not ask your neighbour to talk to you and tell you what it is like. If he should do anything of the kind, the beadle takes him and puts him out of doors, and then the policeman takes him and puts him indoors, and he is punished for his atrocious conduct; and yet you expect me to tell you about this church, whose pillars are the mountains, whose roof is the heaven itself, whose music comes from the harp-strings which the earth has laid over her bosom, which we call pine-trees; and from which the hand of the Unseen draws forth a ceaseless symphony rolling ever around the world.
CHAPTER XXI.
Jacques, the French miner.—A fearful abyss.—The Great Cañon of the Peace River.—We are off on our western way.—Unfortunate Indians.—A burnt baby.—The moose that walks.
It was dusk when I reached the ruined hut which stood at the western end of the portage. My men had long preceded me, and Kalder had supper ready before the great fireplace. The fire shed its light upon a fourth figure; it was that of Jacques, the French miner, five feet two inches in height; miner, trapper, trader, and wanderer since he left his home in Lorraine, near the war-famous citadel of Belfort, some twenty years ago.