The Gulf of Slides beneath my feet was a vast bowl of russet gold decorated with Chinese patterns of deep green. In its very bottom I saw a black stream rounding the edge of a level open meadow where the deep grass had been trodden into paths by the passing deer. All round about it the spruce and firs set a bristling wall of pointed tops, and the quivering air that filled the bowl to the brim was obviously a liquid. I could see it flow up and over the ridge toward the summit of Boott's Spur, and as if to prove that it did so a red-tailed hawk flapped up from the firs that surround the little meadow, caught the updrift of this southerly breeze and soared on it in easy spirals to a point just above the ridge. Here he caught another current that came up the Rocky Branch Valley, a breeze resinous with the last big area of spruce in sight from the summits near Mount Washington, pungent with the smoke of the great woodcutter camps in its midst, and soared on up Boott's Spur. And as he did so the sun flashed back in white fire from a point in a ledge of the Spur overhanging the Gulf of Slides.
Somewhere in the highest hills hung once the great carbuncle whose fame led many early settlers to dare disaster in mountain searches for precious gems. Tradition has it that the great gem vanished from its matrix long ago. Perhaps it did. But something flashes white fire from a high cliff on the Spur to the eye of him who gets the sun at just the right angle from Slide Peak. The carbuncle may be there yet. Certainly the ridge that leads up from the boulder is rich in matrices for gems. Out through its granite burst veins of sparkling quartz, dazzling white, pink and green. Imbedded in this quartz are great crystals of silvery mica and smaller ones of black tourmaline. There are spots along the trail that glitter like a Bowery jeweller's window. This profusion of gemlike stones is to be found all along the way to the high ridge of Boott's Spur and make it doubly fascinating. If the great carbuncle ever really hung high in the mountains I fancy it is still not far from this neighborhood. Very likely it broke from its cliff and lies now buried in the débris of slides at the bottom of the great precipice which springs from the Gulf up to the top of the Spur, leaving only a fragment to dazzle my eyes from the top of Slide Peak. Perhaps the real thing is there yet, and I recommend the Glen Boulder trail to present-day gem hunters.
But from the mountain tops on the last days of September all the world is one of gems. From Washington the range and the Southern peaks which rise from it showed ruby fires of sunlight transmitted by the colored leaves of creeping blueberries and the three-toothed cinquefoil. Lower, emerald and bloodstone glinted among the dwarf firs, and lower yet were zones of gold for the setting of as many gems as the forest could furnish. All the blue stones of the lapidary showed their colors in the distance while the woods of the lower slopes were chrysoprase, garnets, topaz and all other stones which hold red, yellow or green glints in their hearts. Looking westward only the centre of the Fabyan plateau lacked this plaiding of interwoven gem colors. Instead it was a level oasis of tender green around which sat the great hotels in solemn sanctity.
The perfect clearness of this still mountain air was not only for the sight but for the hearing. One's ear seemed to become a wireless telephone receiver and sounds from great distances were plainly audible. Voices of other climbers, I do not know how far away, seemed to come out of the ledges of the high ridge of Boott's Spur as I sat among them and looked toward the great gray summit of Washington. Among the Derryveagh Mountains in the northwest of Ireland I have heard voices of children at play a mile away come out of a fairy rath, or seem to come out of it, and here at far higher levels was a similar spell at work. Finally I located other voices, seeing people on the summit of Monroe and others down at the refuge hut near the Lake of the Clouds, talking to one another. That one party could hear the other at that distance was strange enough, but that I, a mile farther away than the people at the hut, could hear those on top of Monroe was a still greater proof of the wonderful clearness of the air at that time.
The Crawford trail along Franklin, Mount Pleasant in the distance
Such a condition presages storm, and before night, from the summit of Washington, I watched it materialize from thin air. In the sunlit stillness a thin, long line of cumulo-stratus clouds appeared circling the southern horizon from west to east. The line was broken in many places and it was lower than the summit, for I could see clear sky and land through the breaks. It did not seem possible that such a line of disconnected clouds could bring storm. But they joined and thickened while I watched, and by and by, as if at a word of command, far to the south light scuds were detached from them and came scurrying in from beyond Chocorua, blotting out Tremont and Haystack, Bear and Moat, swallowing the Montalban Range and Rocky Branch ridge in their floating fluff, coasting up and over Boott's Spur and blotting out Tuckerman's Ravine. They whirled in upon us, palpable, cotton-batting clouds with a chill in their touch, and wrapped all the summit in gray obscurity.
Again and again they broke and let me see all about, and each time I saw that the ring of cumulo-stratus clouds was denser at the bottom, and had moved in towards us from all the southern half of the horizon. The sun set, but we did not see it. The world was blotted out in a gray mass of scudding vapor that gradually became black night, out of which by and by rain came hissing on a wind that shook the buildings of the tiny summit village beneath their clanking chains. Morning came, and noon of the next day. The wind had changed from south to northwest, the sky in all valleys was clear, but still the dense clouds swirled about the cone of Washington and swathed the high ridge of the whole Presidential Range in masses of fleeting mist. No rain fell from this, but to stand in it was to gather and condense it in the pores of one's garments and become wringing wet.