It faces across its red-tiled, white-balustered terraces and vivid lawns, a sharp river valley that strolls winding amid the mountains. And just as this river turns before it, it tumbles down a rock slide in a vast mass of foam, so that even when one cannot see its beauty at night, its roar can be heard in the wonderful silence of the valley. On the terrace of the hotel are two bathing-pools fed from the sulphur springs of Banff, and here Canadians seem to bathe all day until dance-time—and even slip back for a moonlight bath between dancing and bed.
It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing, walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty. And it is, of course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the Canadians and Americans sign themselves:
"Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane. We are on our honeymoon."
The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful roads. There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.
The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a little cavern deep in the hillside—a cavern made almost impregnable by smell. In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of the spring. Now the Government has arranged things better. It has carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with all modern accessories.
III
From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.
At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the sea-level, but the Château and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional breather in a deep pool, over rocks.
The Château is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but, thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the windows or the broad lawns of the Château, for the mountain and glacier is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of the valley.
Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of trees, is the home of an English woman. She used to spend her days working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely crag. She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly off to California when the winter comes. The Prince went up to take tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.