TRUSTY to his promise, the porter calls us at early dawn. The train is rushing between massive walls of rock, rising to unseen heights and confining the railway to the bank of a swift green river. The official is already up, and standing upon the rearmost platform with closely buttoned coat, for the morning is chilly in the shadows of these Alps.
“This is The Gap,” he explains, “through which Bow River comes out. We follow it almost to its sources, before we come to Kicking-horse Pass, through the central range, or Main Divide. Better have the ladies called. We shall be at Banff in an hour, and they ought not to miss any of this.”
He touches an electric button, directs the responding porter to summon the Vassar family, and we return to the platform.
The Gap has now been traversed, and we can see the great mountains on each side of it. Then we turn northward and run along the river between gigantic upheavals. Their tops are half hidden in the lingering night-mists, but rifts now and then reveal bristling, snow-crested peaks, rosy with premonitions of sunrise, and tiers upon tiers of cliffs bounded by long lines of snow resting upon narrow ledges, and broken by gorges of unmeasured depth filled with blue shadows and swirling fog. It is a wonderful, inspiring, never-to-be-forgotten sight. Awakened and driven out by the skirmish line of the hosts of the morning, the clouds reluctantly forsake their rocky fastnesses, and more and more of the rugged grandeur and height of the bordering ranges, right and left, come out. Soon far-away peaks show daintily, “like kisses on the morning sky,” as one of the ladies expressed it, in imagery chaste, no doubt, but rather cold; and finally, as we sweep toward the face of the gigantic precipices of Cascade Mountain (which seem to rise courteously and advance to welcome us), even the valley shakes off its blanket of haze, and sunshine pours over the crystal heights to sparkle upon dewy leaves and glistening river.
Under these brilliant auspices we step out of the car and into a carriage at Banff, and are whirled away to a great hotel, built upon the grandest site in Canada.
“This hotel is the Company’s property, and here you are to be my guests for the day,” was the command of our genial official, as he registered the names of the party. “It is too early for breakfast. Let us go to the upper balconies and have a look at the mountains. This is Canada’s National Park, you know, and she is proud of it.”
What a picture that north-western balcony opened to us! In the foreground green rolling woodland dotted with turfed openings and the red roofs of cottages or white dots of tents. Then the tortuous and shining course of the Bow River, sweeping gracefully to the right. On the left, steep and wooded slopes; ahead, high mountains—some with their splintered spires towering above rugged and darkly forested foothills, others more distant and breaking into jagged outlines, gashed by blue gulfs and piled with snow, others still farther away, filmy and white upon the western horizon, where the water-shed of the continent rises supreme and superb. Nearer is the cliff-fronted mass of Cascade Mountain, 5,000 feet high, its slender waterfall trembling like a loose ribbon down its broad breast—the badge of its identity. Past it, through a rocky gap, our eyes follow the lower Bow, sparkling with ripples, parted by islets, shadowed by leaning spruces and cottonwoods, to the green ridges where the railway runs, and on to where the white wall of the Fairholme range, a massive rank of heights, upholds wide spaces of stainless snow.
“Just behind that mighty wall, whose tallest peak—Mt. Peechee—is over 10,000 feet in altitude,” our friend tells us, “there is an immense cañon, occupied by a narrow and very deep lake. The Indians believe it to be haunted by malignant demons, and I don’t wonder at it. Cliffs thousands of feet in height rise straight from its margin, and its waters are shadowed by the Devil’s Head and other peaks, that can be seen for a hundred miles out on the plains. To cruise upon its surface in a canoe and catch the monstrous trout that lurk in its coves, while the echoes of your talk and paddling wander from scaur to scaur, and wild goats come to the edge of the crags to look down upon you, is an experience not to be duplicated easily anywhere else in the world.”
“What is this lake called?”