But for all their beauty by day and their cosy friendliness, the Lakes of the Clouds are at their best after nightfall. As the sunshine welled in them, so at dusk the purple shadows grow dense there and the shallows disappear. A boy can throw a stone across these lakes. He can wade them, but as the darkness falls upon them and the juncos pipe the last notes of their evensongs the little lakes widen and grow vastly deep. The farther shores slip away and become ports of dreams, and he who stands on the margin looks down no longer at bare rocks through transparent shallows, but into a universe of fathomless depth where star smiles back at star through infinite distances of blue. Who shall say it is not for this that the little lakes lie through the brief summer, clear mirrors under the shadow of the peak of Monroe?
XIII
CRAWFORD NOTCH
The Mighty Chasm in the Mountains and Its Perennial Charms
In the nick of the Notch—Crawford Notch—the narrow highway so crowds the Saco River that, tiny as it is, it has to burrow to get through, thereby meeting many adventures in a half mile. If Mount Willard had flowed over to the north just a few rods farther, when it was fluid, there would have been no Notch, but only a gulf like that between Washington and the northern peaks, or like Oakes Gulf, barred completely by the vast head wall of metamorphic rock. It came so near that originally there was room only for the Saco to pass down, a slender stream, new-born at the shallow lake on the plain just above. Then the famous old "Tenth Turnpike" of New Hampshire came along and by smashing away the rock and crowding the Saco men made a way through for it. As for the railroad, its case was hopeless. It had to burrow a nick of its own through the base of Mount Willard, and out of the débris of this blasting the road makers built a series of fantastic rock piles, monuments to the heathen deities of Helter-Skelter, which serve to make the gateway in which these three jostle one another, road, railroad and river, more weird even than it was before.
But the gateway is as beautiful as it is fantastic. The road south to it comes along a smiling plain and the mountains draw in to meet it, indeed as if to bar it. On the left Mount Clinton sends down two long ridges between which flows Gibb's Brook. On the right Mount Willard shoulders its rough rock bulk boldly into the way, and down these the spruces stride like tall plumed Indians come to bar the passage of the white man. But the road winds on and just as it seems as if it must stop it finds a way and, fairly burrowing as does the river, flows down the Notch. With the rocks alone the gateway would be a forbidding tangle of débris. Clothed in the hardwood growth, it would be but a greenwood gap. But these pointed spruces and the firs that mingle with them bring to it an architectural dignity of pillars and spires, a jutting of Gothic pinnacles, a suggestion of Ionic columns, that makes it the gateway of a vast woodland cathedral, a place through which one passes to worship and be filled with awe and veneration of the mighty forces that shaped it.
"Profile of Webster," looking toward Crawford Notch from the old Crawford farm-house site
It is a cathedral that has its gargoyles, too; everywhere through the spiring spruces and the softening outlines of deciduous trees protrude the rocks in fantastic shapes that show strange creatures to the imaginative onlooker. Just at the gateway, lumbering out from the mountain, comes an elephant, head and trunk, little eye and flapping ears plainly visible, poised in granite, but ready at any moment to take the one step onward that will reveal the whole gigantic animal standing in the roadway. Beyond, the whole left side of the Notch shows a gigantic face, the mountain's brow itself a noble dome of thought, the nose huge and Roman, and the whole weird and misshapen, but not without a strange dignity of its own. And so it is with the whole formation of the Notch. Its once molten rocks cooled or have been water-worn into strange forms that greet the eye of the imagination at every turn. It is well that the narrow turnpike flows so swiftly down into the depths of the wood and hides the traveller from the sight of too many portents. To get down the nick of the Notch just a little way by road is to be shaded by the overhanging deciduous growth and to be able to forget, as does the Saco, the crowding together of those weird forms carved by the ages from enduring granite.
The railroad hangs to its grade on the mountain side, but the road descends rapidly, though not so rapidly as the river that, here a little released from its pressure between the two, comes to sight again and slips in purling shallows or babbles down miniature cascades, the thinnest of slender streams, to the depths of a shaded cleft in the cliffs known as "The Dismal Pool." Dismal this may be to look at from the height of the train as it winds along the steep face of the Mount Willard cliff. But it is not dismal when one gets down to it, in the very bottom of the nick of the Notch. In places rough gray cliffs, in others black spruces, climb one another's shoulders from this little level of grass and placid water where flows the Saco. A pair of spotted sand-pipers make this their home and they did not resent my coming to join them. Instead they bobbed a greeting and then went on industriously picking up dinner, wading leg deep in the shallows and often putting their heads as well as their long bills under water in search of food. Spotted sand-pipers nest in the summer from Florida to Labrador, but I fancy no pair has a finer home than this little pool in the very bottom of the vast cleft in the mountains which is Crawford Notch. Its shores were netted with the tracks of their nimble feet.