The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that climbed by corkscrew bends. This was thrilling enough, for there were abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly corners.
From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fishing centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore later), where there are rich orchard lands.
With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers, those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.
A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we passed dumps of war material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver. After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.
CHAPTER XVII
THE PACIFIC CITIES: VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA
I
Vancouver was land after a mountain voyage. With the feelings of a seafarer seeing cliffs after a long ocean journey, we reached common, flat country and saw homely asphalt streets.
There can be no two points of view concerning the beauty and grandeur of the mountain scenery through which the Prince had passed, but after a succession of even the most stimulating gorges and glaciers one does turn gladly to a little humanity in the lump. Vancouver was humanity in the lump, an exceedingly large lump and of peculiarly warm and generous emotions. We were glad to meet crowds once more.