The boys looked at it in silence for a moment, and then Peanut said, “But it looks so much bigger in all the pictures in the geographies. Why, it really looks as small up there as—as the moon.”
“That’s because the photographs of it are taken with a telescope lens, I guess,” said Frank. “My camera would make it look about six miles off.”
“How big is it?” asked Lou.
“They say about eighty feet from forehead to chin,” the Scout Master replied. “And it’s about fifteen hundred feet up the cliff.”
“I’d like to see it in full face,” Lou added. “Could we walk down the road and see it that way?”
“We’ve not time, I’m afraid,” Mr. Rogers replied. “We’d have to walk a mile or more. It isn’t so impressive full face. In fact, this is the only spot where the human likeness is perfect. At many points along the road the full face view shows only a mass of rocks.”
Lou was still looking at the great stone face gazing solemnly down over the valley.
“It’s like the Sphinx, somehow,” he said. “I’ve always thought of the Sphinx looking forever out over the desert, and this old man of the mountain looks just the same way forever down the Notch. It gives me a funny feeling—I can’t explain it. But somehow it seems as if he ought to be very wise.”
Peanut laughed, but Mr. Rogers didn’t laugh.
“Lou has just the right feeling about it,” he said. “Lou has just the feeling they say the Indians had. To the Indians, the Great Stone Face was an object of veneration. Did any of you ever read Hawthorne’s story, ‘The Great Stone Face’?”