With eye and ear as well as muscles rested, I go on to the steeper ascent which the path makes through a tangle of firs that diminish in size but increase in numbers as the elevation increases. For long it climbs within sound of Silver Cascade brook, but finally gets too high for it and passes into a little section of silver forest, where for a space all the firs are dead. Most of them still stand erect, the green all gone out of them. Ghosts of the trees they once were, they stand silvery gray in the midst of the green wood, as if a patch of moonlight had forgotten to go when the day came. Into this sunlit place in the surrounding shade of the forest the mountain goldenrod has come till its flowers make all the space beneath the dead trees yellow, a very lake of sunlight. Silver and gold the rocks of the White Mountains may or may not have in their veins, but the White Mountain forests hold the two precious metals in nuggets and pockets and veritable placers for all who will seek.
Not far from this silver forest the path crowds through a dense tangle of dwarf firs and climbs out upon the rough rock dome of Mount Jackson, 4112 feet above the sea level, just rising above the tree line. Here, to be sure, are a few dwarf firs, not knee high, and here climbs plentifully the resinous perfume of their taller brothers just below, but the eye has an uninterrupted sweep of the horizon where few ranges obstruct. Northward, fifteen miles or so across Oakes Gulf, looms Mount Washington, 2181 feet higher still, and the long ridge of the southern peaks descends from this to Clinton, a mighty wall of perpendicular rock set against the sky. The vast basin of the gulf is always a marvel, with its precipitous walls and its expanse of forested floor, the forest so distant and so close set that it looks like the cedar-moss tapestry on the way up; but nowhere is it more impressive than from the summit of Jackson, with its mighty wall of the Presidential Range for a background. Southeast Kearsarge lifts its clean cone over the jumble of mountains that make the northward walls of the Crawford Notch; southwesterly stands Carrigain, with the pinnacles of the Sandwich Range far beyond; while westerly Lafayette rises above Guyot and the Twins, far over Zealand Notch. Under one's feet, almost, lies the green level of the Fabyan plateau with its huge hotels giving almost the only human touch to the view. Out of this depth of distance swings a flock of eaves-swallows, already, like the occupants of the hotels very likely, planning their southern trip and discussing accommodations and gastronomic possibilities. In the upper woods of the trail I had passed through a considerable flock of Hudsonian chickadees, but these had fallen behind and the only birds of the summit were the swift passing swallows. Here again were the summit herbs of the higher hills, the mountain sandwort, mountain cranberry, creeping snowberry, Labrador tea, all springing from mosses in scant soil which obtains in the almost level acre of rock which is the top of the mountain.
It is a place on which to make rendezvous with the winds of the world and be sure they will meet you there, yet, strange to relate, on my day on the summit for a long time no winds blew and gauzy-winged insects from the regions below fluttered lazily over the great rock dome. Here were colias, hunter's, mourning cloak and mountain fritillary butterflies, making the place gay with their bright colors. Here were a score of varieties of diptera and hymenoptera, some of astonishing size and peculiarities of wing and leg, some of amazing brilliancy of color, till I wished for a convocation of the Cambridge Entomological Society to name and describe them for me. None of these unexpected mountain flyers was difficult to capture. Neither was I, and I was glad when a sudden breeze from the west sent them all careering down into the Oakes Gulf whence I dare say they came.
Passing the silver forest on my way down I found my Hudsonian chickadee friend in numbers in the firs once more. Much as I have been in the woods about the Presidential Range it is only lately that I have met these interesting birds, and now I seem to find them in increasing numbers, at the head of the Notch, on the northerly slope of Mount Pleasant, and here. I have sought them for long, and at last, as Thoreau said of the wild geese, they fly over my meridian and I am able to bag them by shooting up chimney. Perhaps a more reasonable interpretation would be that now the nestlings are full fledged and the increased flocks beginning to range far in search of food. August passes and the wind out of the north has sometimes in it a zest that collects flocks and sets the migratory instinct to throbbing in many a bird's breast.
No tang of the north wind could touch the heart of the deep woods down the trail, but there, too, as I descended I found the promise of autumn written in many colored characters in the enchanting gloom. The Clintonias spelled it in the Prussian blue ink of their ripe berries. The creeping snowberry had done it in white and the Mitchella, Gaultheria, and Trillium in varying shades of red. Even the Indian pipe which writes "hush" and "peace" all along the forest floor in late summer seems in this way to tell of the season of rough winds, migrating birds and falling scarlet leaves that is just ahead of us. Its pallid attempt to hold the full glory of the ripened summer where it is cannot succeed here on the high northern hills where the summer is at best but a brief sojourner. Rather, for all its desires, it seems but a pale flower of sleep, presaging that white forgetfulness of snow that will presently descend through the whispering hemlock leaves and blot out all this writing on the forest floor.
Ah, these wise old hemlocks of the deep trails of the Northern woods! These indeed of the forest primeval,
"Bearded with moss, in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,