The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

“By thunder!” ejaculated Jehu, “there was my leaders all in a lather, an’ backin’ almost atop of the fill-horses, and them passengers a-shoutin’ like lunatics let out on a picnic. ‘Look! darn it all,’ sez I, a-pintin’ with my whip. My hosses was all in a heap, I tell ye, rarin’ and charging, when a little Harvard student, with his head sand-papered, sung out, ‘All right, Cap, I’ve chucked your hind wheels;’ and then he made for the leaders’ heads. Them college chaps ain’t such darned fools arter all, they ain’t.”

“What was it?”

“A big black bear, all huddled up in a bunch, a-takin’ his morning observation on the scenery from the top of a dead sycamore. You see the side of the hill was so slantin’ steep that he wa’n’t more’n tew rod from the road.”

“What did you do?”

“Dew?” echoed the driver, laughing – “dew?” he repeated, “why, them crazy passengers, when they found the bear couldn’t get at them, just picked up rocks and hove them at the old cuss. When one hit him a crack, Lord, how he’d shake his head and growl! But, you see, he couldn’t get at ‘em, so they banged away, until Mr. Bruin couldn’t stan’ it any longer, an’ slid right down the tree as slick as grease, and as mad as Old Nick. It tickled me most to death to see him a-makin’ tooth-picks fly from that tree.”

“Was that your only encounter with bears?” I asked, willing to draw him out.

“Waal, no, not exactly,” he replied, chuckling to himself, gleefully, at some recollection the question revived. “There used to be a tame bear over to the Alpine House. One night the critter got loose, and we all cal’lated he’d took to the woods. Anyhow we hunted high and low; but no bear. Waal, you see, one forenoon our hostler Mike – his real name was Pat, but there was another Pat came afore him, so we called t’other Mike – went up in the barn-chamber to pitch some hay down to the hosses.” Here he stopped and began to choke.

“Well, go on; what has that to do with the bear?”

“Just you hold your hosses a minnit, stranger. Mike hadn’t no sooner jabbed his pitchfork down, so as to git a big bunch, when it struck something soft-like, and then, before he knew what ailed him, the hay-mow riz rite up afore him, with the almightiest growl comin’ out on’t was ever heerd in any maynagery this side of Noah’s Ark.”

Here the driver broke down utterly, gasping, “Oho! aha! oh Lord! ah! ha! ha! ha! ha! ho! ho! Mike!” until his breath was quite gone, and the big tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he heaved a deep sigh, attempted to go on, but immediately went off in a second hysterical explosion. I waited for his recovery.

“Waal,” he at length resumed, “the long and short of it was this: that air bear had buried himself under the hay-mow, and was a-snoozin’ it comfortable and innocent as you please, when Mike prodded him in the ribs with the pitchfork. The fust any of us knew we saw Mike come a-flyin’ out of the barn-chamber window and the bear arter him. Mike led him a length. Maybe that Irishman didn’t streak it for the house! Bless you, he never teched the ground arter he struck it! The boys couldn’t do anything for laughing, and Mick was so scart he forgot to yell. That bear was so hoppin’ wild we had to kill him; and if you wanted to make Mike fightin’ mad any time, all you had to do was to ask him to go up in the barn-chamber and pitch down a bear.”

The first four miles are merely toilsome. It is only when emerging upon the bare crags above the woods that the wonders of the ascent begin, and the succession of views, dimly seen through my eyes in this chapter, challenges the attention at every step. There is one exception. About a mile up, the road issues upon a jutting spur of the mountain, from which the summit, with the house on the highest point, is seen in clear weather.

Suddenly I came out of the low firs, the scrubby growth of birches, upon the fear-inspiring desolation of the bared and wintry summit. The high sun poured down with dazzling brightness upon the white ledges, which, rising like a wall above the solitary cabin before me, thrust their jagged edges in the way, as if to forbid farther progress. Out of this glittering precipice dead trees thrust huge antlers. This formless mass overhanging the Half-Way House, known as The Ledge, is one of the most terrific sights of the journey.

Until clear of the woods, my uneasiness, inspired by the recollection of the ascent from Crawford’s, was extreme; but I now stood, in the full blaze of an unclouded sun, upon a treeless wilderness of rock, a gratified spectator of one of the most extraordinary scenes it has ever fallen to man’s lot to witness. But what a frightful silence! Not a murmur; not a rustling leaf; but all still as death. I was half-afraid.

At my feet yawned the measureless void of the Great Gulf, torn from the entrails of the mountain by Titanic hands. Above my head leaped up the endless pile of granite constituting the dome of Washington. It had now exchanged its gray cassock for pale green. All around was unutterable desolation. Crevassed with wide splits, encompassed round by lofty mountain walls, the gorge was at once fascinating and forbidding, grand yet terrible. The high-encircling steeps of Clay and Jefferson, Adams and Madison, enclosing it with one mighty sweep, ascended out of its depths and stretched along the sky, which seemed receding before their daring advance. Peering down into the abyss, where the tallest pines were shrubs and their trunks needles, the earth seemed split to its centre, and the feet of these mountains rooted in the midst. To confront such a spectacle unmoved one should be more, or less than human.

Looking backward over the forest through which I had come, the eye caught a blur of white and a gleam of blue in the Peabody Glen. The white was the hotel, the blue the river. Following the vale out to its entrance upon the Androscoggin meadows, the same swift messenger ascended Moriah, and, traversing the confederate peaks to the summit of Mount Carter, stopped short at its journey’s end.

As I slowly mounted the Ledge the same unnatural appearance was everywhere – the same wreck, same desolation, same discord. The dead cedars, bleaching all around, looked like an army of gigantic crabs crawling up the mountain side, which universal ruin overspread, and which even the soft sunshine rendered more ghastly and more solemn. I looked eagerly along the road; listened. Not a human being; not a sound. I was alone upon the mountain.

From here I no longer walked upon earth but on air. Respiration became more and more difficult. Not even a zephyr stirred, while the glare was painful to eyes already overtaxed in the endeavor to grasp the full meaning of this most unaccustomed scene. The road, steadily ascending, showed its zigzags far up the mountain. Now and then a rude receptacle had been dug, or rather built up, by the road-side, in which earth to mend the road was stored; and this soil, wholly composed of disintegrated rock, must be scraped from underneath the ledges, from crevices, from hollows, and husbanded with care. “As cheap as dirt,” was a saying without significance here. As I neared the summit the melting snows had, in many places, swept it bare, exposing the naked ledge; and here earth must be brought up from lower down the mountain. But the pains bestowed upon it equals the incessant demand for its preservation, and had I not seen with my own eyes I could scarcely have believed so excellent a specimen of road-making existed in this desert.

But how long will the mountain resist the denuding process constantly going on, and what repair the gradual but certain disintegration of the peak? It is a monument of human inability to act upon it in any way. Be it so. The snows, the frosts, the rains, pursue their work none the less surely. You see in the deep gullies, the avalanches of stones, the sands of the sea-shore – so many evidences of the forces which, sooner or later, will accomplish the miracle and remove the mountain.

From my next halting-place I perceived that I had been traversing a promontory of the mountain jutting boldly out into the Great Gulf, above the Half-Way House; and, looking down over the parapet-wall, a mile or more of the road uncoiled its huge folds, turning hither and thither, doubling upon itself like a bewildered serpent, and, like the serpent, always gaining a little on the mountain. This is one of the strangest sights of this strange journey; but, in order to appreciate it at its full value, one should be descending by the stage-coach, when the danger, more apparent than real, is intensified by the swift descent of the mountain into the gulf below, over which the traveller sees himself suspended with feelings more poignant than agreeable. The fact that there has never been a fatal accident upon the carriage-road speaks volumes for the caution and skill of the drivers; but, as one of the oldest and most experienced said to me, “There should be no fooling, no chaffing, and no drinking on that road.”21

Continuing to ascend, the road once more took a different direction, curving around that side of the mountain rising above the Pinkham forest. This détour brought the Carter chain upon my left, instead of on my right.

Thus far I had encountered little snow, though the rocks were everywhere crusted with ice; but now a sudden turning brought me full upon an enormous bank, completely blocking the road, which here skirted the edge of a high precipice. Had a sentinel suddenly barred my way with his bayonet, I could not have been more astonished. I was brought to a dead stand. I looked over the parapet, then at the snow-bank, then at the mountain. The first look made me shudder, the second thoughtful, the third gave me a headache.

At this spot the side of the mountain was only a continuation of the precipice, bent slightly backward from the perpendicular, and ascending several hundred feet higher. The snow, extending a hundred feet or more above, and conforming nearly with the slope of the mountain, filled the road for thrice that distance. I saw that it was only prevented from sliding into the valley by the low wall of loose stones at the edge of the road; but how long would that resist the great pressure upon it? The snow-bank had already melted at its edges, so that I could crawl some distance underneath, and hear the drip of water above and below, showing that it was being steadily undermined. In fact, the whole mass seemed on the point of precipitating itself over the precipice. I could neither go around it nor under it; so much was certain.

What to do? I had only a strong umbrella, the inseparable companion of my mountain jaunts, and the glacier was as steep as a roof. What assurance was there that if I ventured upon it the whole sheet, dislodged by my weight, might not be shot off the mountain side, carrying me with it to the bottom of the abyss? But while I felt no desire to add mine to the catalogue of victims already claimed by the mountain, the idea of being turned back was inadmissible. Native caution put the question, “Will you?” and native persistency answered, “I will.”

When a thing is to be done, the best way is to do it. I therefore tried the snow, and, finding a solid foothold, resolved to venture; had it been soft, I should not have dared. Using my umbrella as an alpenstock, I crossed on the parapet, where the declivity was the least, and without accident, but slowly and breathlessly, until near the opposite side, when I passed the intervening space in two bounds, alighting in the road with the blood tingling to my fingers’ ends.

A sharp turn around a ledge, and the south-east wall of Tuckerman’s Ravine rose up, like a wraith, out of the forest. Nearer at hand was the head of Huntington’s, while to the right the cone of Washington loomed grandly more than a thousand feet higher. A little to the left you look down into the gloomy depths of the Pinkham defile, the valley of Ellis River, the Saco Valley to North Conway, where the familiar figure of Kearsarge is the presiding genius. The blue course of the Ellis, which is nothing but a long cascade, the rich green of the Conway intervales, the blanched peak of Chocorua, the sapphire summits of the Ossipee Mountains, were presented in conjunction with the black and humid walls of the ravine, and the iron-gray mass of the great dome. The crag on which I stood leans out over the mountain like a bastion, from which the spectator sees the deep-intrenched valleys, the rivers which wash the feet of the monarch, and the long line of summits which partake his grandeur while making it all the more impressive.22

Turning now my back upon the Glen, the way led in the opposite direction, and began to look over the depression between Clay and Jefferson into the world of blue peaks beyond. From here the striking spectacle of the four great northern peaks, their naked summits, their sides seamed with old and new slides, and flecked with snow, constantly enlarged. There were some terrible rents in the side of Clay, red as half-closed wounds; in one place the mountain seemed cloven to its centre. It was of this gulf that the first climber said it was such a precipice he could scarce discern to the bottom. The rifts in the walls of the ravine, the blasted fir-trees leaning over the abyss, and clutching the rocks with a death-gripe, the rocks themselves, tormented, formidable, impending, astound by their vivid portrayal of the formless, their suggestions of the agony in which these mountains were brought forth.

I was now fairly upon the broad, grass-grown terrace at the base of the pinnacle, sometimes called the Cow Pasture. The low peak rising upon its limits is a monument to the fatal temerity of a traveller who, having climbed, as he supposed, to the top of the mountain, died from hunger or exposure, or from both, at this inhospitable spot.23 A skeleton in rags was found, at the end of a year, huddled under some rocks. Farther down the mountain a heap of stones indicates the place where Doctor Ball, of Boston, was found by the party sent in search of him, famished, exhausted, and almost delirious. When rescued, he had passed two nights upon the mountain, without food, fire, or shelter, after as many days of fruitless wandering up and down, always led astray by his want of knowledge, and mocked by occasional glimpses of snowy peaks above, or the distant Glen below. More dead than alive, he was supported down the mountain as far as the camp at The Ledge, whence he was able to ride to the Glen House. His reappearance had the effect of one risen from the dead. In reality, the rescuing party took up with them materials for a rude bier, expecting to find a dead body stiffening in the snow.24

Besides this almost unheard of resistance to hunger, cold, and exhaustion combined, and notwithstanding the fortitude which enabled the lost man to continue his desperate struggle for life until rescued, all would doubtless have been to no purpose without the aid of an umbrella, which, by a lucky chance, he took at setting out. This umbrella was his only protection during the two terrible vigils he made upon the mountain. How, is related in the chapter on the ascent from Crawford’s.

Crossing the terrace, where even the road seems glad to rest after its laborious climb of seven miles, and where the traveller may also relax his efforts, preparatory to his arduous advance up the pinnacle, I came upon the railway, still solidly embedded in snow and ice.

Still making a route for itself among massy blocks, tilted at every conceivable angle, but forming, nevertheless, a symmetrical cone, the carriage-road winds up the steep ascent, to which the railway is nailed. While traversing the plateau, with the Summit House now in full view, my eye caught, far above me, the figure of a man pacing up and down before the building, like a sentinel on his post. I swung my hat in the air; again; but he did not see me. Nevertheless, I experienced a thrill of pleasure at seeing him, so acutely had the sense of loneliness come over me in these awful solitudes. It put such vigor into my steps that in half an hour I crossed the last rise, when the solitary pedestrian, making an about-face at the end of his beat, suddenly discovered a strange form and figure emerging from the rocks before him. He stopped short, took the pipe from his teeth, looking with open-mouthed astonishment, then, as I continued to approach, he hastened toward me, met me half-way, and, between rapid questions and answers, led the way into the signal station.

Behold me installed in the cupola of New England! While I was resting, my host, a tall, bronzed, bearded man, bustled about the two or three apartments constituting this swallow’s nest. He put the kettle on the stove, gave the fire a stir, spread a cloth upon the table, and took some plates, cups, and saucers from a locker, some canned meats and fruit from a cupboard, I, meanwhile, following all these movements with an interest easily imagined. His preparations completed, my host first ran his eye over them approvingly, then, presenting a pen, requested me to inscribe my name in the visitors’ book. I did so, noticing that the last entry was in October – that is, five months had elapsed since the last climber wended his solitary way down the mountain. My hospitable entertainer then, with perfect politeness, begged me to draw my chair to the table and fall to. I did not refuse. While he poured out the tea, I asked,

“Whom have I the pleasure of addressing?” and he modestly replied,

“Private Doyle, sir, of the United States Signal Service. Have another bit of devilled ham? No? Try these peaches.”

“Thank you. At least Uncle Sam renders your exile tolerable. Is this your ordinary fare?”

“Oh, as to that, you should see us in the dead of winter, chopping our frozen meat with a hatchet, and our lard with a chisel.”

This, then, was what my young Jehu had meant. Where was I? I glanced out of the window. Nothing but sky, nothing but rocks; immensity and desolation. I disposed my ideas to hear my companion ask, “What is the news from the other world?”

VIII.

MOUNT WASHINGTON

The soldiers from the mountain Theches ran from rear to front, breaking their ranks, crowding tumultuously upon each other, laughing and shouting, “The sea! the sea!” – Xenophon’s Anabasis.

AFTER the repast we walked out, Private Doyle and I, upon the narrow platform behind the house. According to every appearance I had reached Ultima Thule.

For some moments – moments not to be forgotten – we stood there silent. Neither stirred. The scene was too tremendous to be grasped in an instant. A moment was needed to recover one’s moral equipoise, as well as for the unpractised eye to adjust itself to the vastness of the landscape, and to the multitude of objects, strange objects, everywhere confronting it. My own sensations were at first too vague for analysis, too tumultuous for expression. The flood choked itself.

All seemed chaos. On every side the great mountains fell away like mists of the morning, dispersing, receding to an endless distance, diminishing, growing more and more vague, and finally vanishing on a limitless horizon neither earth nor sky. Never before had such a spectacle offered itself to my gaze. The first idea was of standing on the threshold of another planet, and of looking down upon this world of ours outspread beneath; the second, of being face to face with eternity itself. No one ever felt exhilaration at first. The scene is too solemnizing.

But by degrees order came out of this chaos. The bewildering throng of mountains arranged itself in chains, clusters, or families. Hills drew apart, valleys opened, streams twinkled in the sun, towns and villages clung to the skirts of the mountains or dotted the rich meadows; but all was mysterious, all as yet unreal.

Comprehending at last that all New England was under my feet, I began to search out certain landmarks. But this investigation is fatiguing: besides, it conducts to nothing – absolutely nothing. Pointing to a scrap of blue haze in the west, my companion observed, “That is Mount Mansfield;” and I, mechanically, repeated, “Ah! that is Mount Mansfield.” It was nothing. Distance and Infinity have no more relation than Time and Eternity. It sufficed for me, God knows, to be admitted near the person of the great autocrat of New England, while under skies so fair and radiant he gave audience to his imposing and splendid retinue of mountains.

But still, independent of the will, the eye flitted from peak to peak, from summit to summit, making the slow circuit of this immense horizon, hovering at last over a band of white gleaming far away in the south-east like a luminous cloud, on whose surface objects like birds reposed. It was the sea, and the specks ships sailing on the main. With the aid of a telescope we could even tell what sails the vessels carried. In these few seconds the eye had put a girdle of six hundred miles about.25

I consider this first introduction to what the peak of Mount Washington looks down upon an epoch in any man’s life. I saw the whole noble company of mountains from highest to lowest. I saw the deep depressions through which the Connecticut, the Merrimac, the Saco, the Androscoggin, wind toward the lowlands. I saw the lakes which nurse the infant tributaries of those streams. I saw the great northern forests, the notched wall of the Green Mountains, the wide expanse of level land, flat and heavy like the ocean, and finally the ocean itself. And all this was mingled in one mighty scene.

The utmost that I can say of this view is that it is a marvel. You receive an impression of the illimitable such as no other natural spectacle – no, not even the sea – can give. Astonishment can go no farther. Nevertheless, the truth is that you are on too high a view-point for the most effective grasp of mountain scenery. This immense height renders near objects indistinct, obscures the more distant. Seldom, indeed, is the land seen, even under favoring conditions, except through a soft haze, which, you are surprised to notice, becomes more and more transparent as you descend. The eye explores this clair-obscur, and gradually discerns this or that object. It is true that you see to a great distance, but you do not distinguish anything clearly. This is the rule, derived from many observations, to which the crystal air of autumn and winter makes the rare and fortunate exception.

There is a more cogent reason why the view from Mount Washington is inferior to that from other and lower summits. Everything is below you, and, naturally, therefore, any picture of these mountains not showing the cloud-capped dome of the monarch, attended by his cortége of grand peaks – the central, dominating, perfecting group – must be essentially incomplete. Imagine Rome without St. Peter’s, or, to come nearer home, Boston without her State House! One word more: from this lofty height you lose the symmetrical relation of the lesser summits to the grand whole. Even these signal embodiments of heroic strength – the peaks of Jefferson, Adams, and Madison – so vigorously self-asserting that what they lose in stature they gain by a powerful individuality, even these suffer a partial eclipse; but the summits stretching to the southward are so dwarfed as to be divested of any character as typical mountain structures. What fascinates us is the “sublime chaos of trenchant crests, of peaks shooting upward;” and the charm of the view – such at least is the writer’s conviction – resides rather in the immediate surroundings than in the extent of the panorama, great as that unquestionably is.

One thing struck me with great force – the enormous mass of the mountain. The more you realize that the dependent peaks, stretching eight miles north, and as many south, are nothing but buttresses, the more this prodigious weight amazes. Two long spurs, divided by the valley of the Rocky Branch, also descend into the Saco Valley as far as Bartlett; and another, shorter, but of the same indestructible masonry, is traced between the valleys of the Ammonoosuc and of Israel’s River. In a word, as the valleys lie and the roads run, we must travel sixty or seventy miles around in order to make the circuit of Mount Washington at its base.

Even here one is not satisfied if he sees a stone ever so little above him.26 The best posts for an outlook, after the signal station, are upon a point of rocks behind the old Tip-Top House, and from the end of the hotel platform, where the railway begins its terrifying descent. From all these situations the view was large and satisfying. From the first station one overlooks the southern summits; from the second, the northern. A movement of the head discloses, in turn, the ocean, the lakes and lowlands of Maine and New Hampshire, the broad highlands of Massachusetts, the fading forms of Monadnock and Wachusett, the highest peaks of Vermont and New York, and, finally, the great Canadian wilderness.