Stand like harpers hoar with beards that rest on their bosoms."
These are the wise old men of the woods. Erect and tall, of mighty compactness of muscles and shaggy headed with deep green, conical capes shielding crown and shoulders, they seem less trees than woodland deities, and to stand among them is to be present at an assembly of demigods of the forest. The wisdom of centuries, blown about the world by the west winds, finds voice in their whispering leaves, and I, listening in the cool twilight below, hear it told in forest runes. Some day someone who loves the woods enough shall learn to translate this runic rhyme of the harper hemlocks as their tops chant to the west wind and send the music down the listening forest aisles where the Indian pipes whitely whisper "hush" and "peace"—and the translator will be very wise thereby.
He who climbs Jackson shall see much beauty of wild gulfs and rugged peaks, and this I saw. But more vividly in my memory of the trip linger the sunny glade under the silver firs all yellow with its flood of goldenrod, and the moss-clad rocks with their messages written in white Indian pipe blooms. Most vivid of all is the personality of those stately old-man hemlocks that stand with such dignity, making the deep woods along the trail.
XV
CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT
The Mountain and Its Overlook from the Very Heart of the Hills
On no peak of the White Mountains does one have so supreme a sense of uplift as on Carrigain. Here is a mountain for you! No nubble on top of a huge table-land is Carrigain but a peak that springs lightly into the unfathomable blue from deep valleys of black forest. So high is this summit that from it you look through the quivering miles of blue air right down upon the mountains in the heart of whose ranges it stands and see them reproduced in faithful miniature below, a relief map on the scale of an inch to the mile. In the very middle of the mountain world you see the mountains as the eagle sees them, and so isolated is the peak that like the eagle you seem to swim in air as you watch.
The black growth of spruce and fir climbs Carrigain from all directions. Over from Hancock it swarms along the ridge from the westward. From the Pemigewasset it sweeps upward, and from Carrigain Notch it leaps twice, once to the round summit of Vose Spur, a clean bound of almost two thousand feet, then on to another higher point, and again to the mountain top. Up Signal Ridge from the east and south it scales almost perpendicular heights for a mile, leaving only the thin, dizzy edge of this spur bare and going on by the sides to the top of the main mountain. The path to the summit makes its final assault through this black growth to the knife edge of Signal Ridge by one of the most desperately perpendicular climbs in the whole region. One or two trails are steeper, a little, notably part of that from Crawford Notch up Mount Willey, but none holds so grimly to its purpose of uplifting the climber for so great a distance as does this. Four and a half miles of pleasant journey in from the railroad station at Sawyer's River, this mighty ascent begins a strong upward movement at the old lumber camp known as "Camp 5." Thence for about two miles it goes up in the air at a most prodigious angle, with no suggestion of let up till the dismayed and gasping climber finally emerges on the knife edge of the ridge summit and willingly forgives the mountain for all it has done to him. If the climb had no more to give than just this outlook from Signal Ridge it were worth all the heart failure and locomotor ataxia it may have caused.
Right under the onlooker's feet the north side of the ridge drops away almost sheer to the deep gash in the mountain, which is Carrigain Notch. Across the valley rises the sheer wall of Mount Lowell, with a great, beetling cliff of red rock half way up intersected by a slide, the whole looking as if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass. The summit of Lowell is far below the observer's feet, and the whole mass is so small a thing in the mighty outlook before him that it seems ridiculous to call it a mountain. It is but an insignificant knob on the universe in sight.
"As if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass"