"Soo" let us into a wonderful tract of country.
Still in the sumptuous C.P.R. train, we swung north over the Algoma Railway track into a land so wildly magnificent and yet so lonely, that one felt that the railway line must have been built by poets for poets—we could not imagine it thriving on anything else.
As a matter of fact, it does link up rich mining and other territory, and, in time, will open a land of equal value, but just now its chief asset is scenery.
The scenery is superb. Its hills are huge and battlemented. They leap up sheer above the train, menacing it; they drop down starkly, leaving the line clinging to a ledge above a white, angry stream on a white rock bed. They crowd the line into gorges, from which the sun is banished, and where the moveless firs look like lost souls chained in the gloom of Eblis. They expand abruptly, suddenly, into swinging valleys, on whose great flanks the spruce forests look like toy decorations hanging above floors of shining sapphire—lakes, of course, but one could not think that any lake could be so blue.
Lakes fretted into lagoons by thin white slivers of shingle; rivers full of tumbled and dishevelled logs; forests in green, in which the crimson maple leaf burns brightly; vast amphitheatres of cliff-like hills; mounds of the stark Laurentine rock pushing up through trees like bald heads through the sparse covering of departing hair; miles of blanched trees and black trees standing like skeletons or strewn all-whither, like billets of stick—acres of murdered stumps, where evil forest fires have swept along; and we had even an occasional glimpse of that scourge of Canada seen smoking sullenly in the distance—all this heaped together, piled together in a reckless luxuriance makes up the scenery of the Algoma country.
Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man and his works.
On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a disconcerting bump. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing—only that particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.
When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees—the depth one is going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places. And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the bridge could hold it.
He said he thought so, but it had never been tested by such a weight before.
From the way he said "thought," we gathered he meant "hoped."