Canada; its Defences, Condition, and Resources / Being a third and concluding volume of "My Diary, North and South"

by Sir William Howard Russell

On the whole, however, the expedition was much to be enjoyed, the air was bracing, and the cold not intense, and the scene “slid into the soul” with all its deep tranquillity. Doubtless it produced a very different effect on the red-nosed Britons who were keeping watch and ward on the ramparts of the citadel, or on the poor “habitant” trudging patiently beside his sleigh-load of wood, and knowing that snow is his portion for the next five months.

On our right a continuous movement of white rugged masses, to all appearance like a stream of polar bears, betokened the course of the unfrozen St. Lawrence; on our left rose the high bank of the lake over which we were travelling, and cottages of the villagers; before us the sleighs were streaming towards a point which ran out into the river and beyond which there seemed to be a shallow bay. This was the point at which the Montmorenci river, recovering from its fall, expanded into a broad sheet at its junction with the greater river. Here we arrived in about an hour.

At the Point there were a few houses, some vessels imbedded in the snow, and piles of sawn timber and deal planks, and a great concourse of sleighs; and beyond it, looking up to the left, at the distance of some half-mile, we saw a glistening sugarloaf of snow, on the summit of which the creaming, yellow-tinged mass of the Falls apparently precipitated itself from the high precipice which bars the course of the stream. On the snow between us and the sugarloaf, and up the white sides of the latter, little black objects were toiling with small progress, but at intervals one of them, gliding from the top of the cone like a falling star in the Inferno, rushed prone to the base, and thence carried by the impetus of the descent skimmed over the ice towards us for hundreds of yards, like a round shot till its force was spent.

Of the crowd gathered at the Point nearly every one had the small hand-sleigh, something like a tiny truck with iron runners, under the arm, known in the vernacular as a “tarboggin,” of the derivation of which it is better to confess ignorance. A few were provided with sleighs of ampler proportions, and all the visitors were bent on tarboggining it, either from a shoulder of the Cone or from the summit of the mass itself.

As we approached over the snow the natives, men and women, flew past us on their way after a rush down the Cone, shouting to the bystanders to take care. Sometimes two were together, the lady seated on the front part of the machine, the man behind lying on his face with his feet stretched out so as to guide the sleigh by the smallest touch against the ice. At a distance the pleasure-seekers looked like some hideous insects impelled towards us with incredible velocity. As they came near and flew past, the expression of their countenances by no means indicated serene enjoyment.

Near the Cone itself a crowd of “tarboggin” hirers and guides beset us and guaranteed a safe descent, but it seemed a doubtful pleasure at best, and there was some chance of breaking limb, as we were told happened frequently during the season. We ascended to the lower shoulder of the Cone by steps in the snow and gazed on the scene with some curiosity. Not only were the people launching themselves from the Cone, but more adventurous still there were who, climbing up the steep side of the precipice, tarboggin under arm, at last reached some vantage snow, by the side of the Fall, where they threw themselves flat on the sleigh, and then came rushing down with a force which carried them clear up the side of the lower ledge of the Cone and over it, so that they were once more plunged downwards and were borne off towards the St. Lawrence.

It could now be very plainly seen that the Falls fell behind the Cone into a boiling turbulent basin, which fretted the edge of the ice and repelled its advances. Although much diminished in volume the body of water, which makes a leap of 250 feet down a sheer rock face into the caldron, was sufficiently large to present all the finest characteristics of a waterfall, but it was at times enveloped in a mist of snow, or rather of frozen spray, which blew into eyes, mouth, ears, and clothes, and penetrated to the very marrow of one’s bones. And it is of this ever-falling frozen rain the Cone is built, and as the winter lengthens on the Cone grows higher and higher, till in favourable seasons it reaches an altitude of 120 feet. It is as regular as the work of an architect, and, I need not say, much more beautiful. At present it had not attained its full growth, and was only 80 feet in height—but its symmetry was of Nature’s own handiwork. The Falls are in a narrow concave cup of rock crested with pine forests, and its sides now forbid the ascent, which is practicable in summer time by a series of natural steps in the strata. The waters cover this young cone with wings of spray and foam, and flittering, tremulous, and unsubstantial as they are, it is nevertheless from their aerial vapours that the solid and sturdy ice mountain grows up.

Of its substantial nature we had an excellent proof—of a human, practical kind: for, obeying many invitations, we walked along a snow path which led to a portal cut in the solid oxide of hydrogen, and entering found ourselves in a hot and stuffy apartment excavated from the body of the Cone, in which there was an Americanised bar, with drinks suited to the locality, and as much want of air as one would find in a house in the Fifth Avenue of New York. It was full of people, who drank whiskey and other strong waters.

I know not by what seduction overcome, but, somehow, so it happened, that one of my companions, on our return to the outer air and light, was led to sacrifice himself on a tarboggin, and yielded to a demon guide. I watched him toiling on, with painful steps and slow, doggedly up the path towards the slippery summit, and, when he had gained it, I slid down below to observe the result of the experiment, and judge whether it looked pleasant or not. He was but an item among many, but I knew he was among the braves des braves, and had received a baptism of fire in the trenches of Sebastopol, which had rained a very font of glory in India, and scarcely paled in China. I watched him assuming the penal attitude to which the young tarbogginer is condemned, and after a balance for a moment on the giddy height, his guide gave a kick to the snow, and down like a plunging bomb flew the ice-winged Icarus. He passed me close; I could see and mark him well. Never, to judge from facial expression, could man have been in deadlier fear. With hard-set mouth, staring and rigid eyes, and aspect quite antipathetic to pleasure, he careered like one who is falling from a house top, and his countenance had scarce assumed its wonted placid look when I met him gasping and half faint. And yet he had the astounding audacity to say, “It was delicious. Never had a more delightful moment,” when he came back pale and panting from his flight.

We returned from the Falls by a hilly, rough road over the bank of the Lake, and arrived at our hotel in time to dress for dinner, to which I was invited at the house of a Canadian gentleman, I think an Englishman by birth, who entertained us right hospitably.