The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

If I had never before realized how the most vigorous travellers had perished within a few paces of the summit, I understood it this day.

Bathed in perspiration, warned by the fresh snow that the path would soon be lost beyond recovery, we held a brief council upon the situation before and behind us. It was more than aggravating either way.

All three secretly favored a retreat. Without doubt it was not only the safest, but the wisest course to pursue; yet to turn back was to give in beaten, and defeat was not easy to accept. Even George, notwithstanding his ankle, was pluckily inclined to go on. There was no time to lose, so we emerged from the friendly shelter of a jutting ledge upon the trackless waste before us.

From this point, at the northern foot of Pleasant, progress was necessarily slow. We could not distinguish objects twenty paces through the flying scud and snow, and we knew vaguely that somewhere here the mountain ridge suddenly broke off, on both sides, into precipices thousands of feet down. George, being lame, kept the middle, while the colonel and I searched for stone-heaps at the right and left.

We were marching along thus, when I heard an exclamation, and saw the colonel’s hat driven past me through the air. The owner ran rapidly over to my side.

“Take care!” I shouted, throwing myself in his path; “take care!”

“But my hat!” cried he, pushing on past me. The wind almost drowned our voices.

“Are you mad?” I screamed, gripping his arm, and forcing him backward by main strength.

He gave me a dazed look, but seemed to comprehend nothing of my excitement. George halted, looking first at one, then at the other.

“Wait,” said I, loosening a piece of ice with my boot. On both sides of us rose a whirlpool of boiling clouds. I tossed the piece of ice in the direction the hat had taken – not a sound; a second after the first – the same silence; a third in the opposite direction. We listened intently, painfully, but could hear nothing except the loud beating of our own hearts. A dozen steps more would have precipitated our companion from the top to the bottom of the mountain.

I looked at the man whose arm I still tightly grasped. He was as pale as a corpse.

“This must be Oakes’s Gulf,” I ventured, in order to break the silence, after we had all taken a pull at the flask.

“This is Oakes’s Gulf – agreed; but where in perdition is my hat?” demanded the colonel, wiping the big drops from his forehead.

After he had tied a handkerchief around his head, we crossed this Devil’s Bridge, with the caution of men fully alive to the consequences of a false step, and with that tension of the nerves which announces the terrible or the unknown.9

We had not gone far when a tremendous gust sent us reeling toward the abyss. I dropped on my hands and knees, and my companions followed suit. We arose, shook off the snow, and slowly mounted the long, steep, and rocky side of Franklin. Upon gaining the summit, the walking was better. We were also protected by the slope of the mountain. The worst seemed over. But what fantastic objects were the big rocks, scattered, or rather lying in wait, along our route! What grotesque appearances continually started out of the clouds! Now it was an enormous bear squatted on his haunches; now a dark-browed sphinx; and more than once we could have sworn we saw human beings stealthily watching us from a distance. How easy to imagine these weird objects lost travellers, suddenly turned to stone for their presumptuous invasion of the domain of terrors! It really seemed as if we had but to stamp our feet to see a legion of demons start into life and bar our way.

Say what you will, we could not shake off the dread which these unearthly objects inspired; nor could we forbear, were it at the risk of being turned to stone, looking back, or peering furtively from side to side when some new apparition thrust its hideous suggestions before us. What would you have? Are we not all children who shrink from entering a haunted chamber, and shudder in the presence of death? Well, the mountain was haunted, and death seemed near. We forgot fatigue, forgot cold, to yield to this mysterious terror, which daunted us as no peril could do, and froze us with vague presentiment of the unknown.

Covered from head to foot with snow, bearded with icicles, tracking this solitude, which refused the echo of a foot-fall, like spectres, we seemed to have entered the debatable ground forever dedicated to spirits having neither home on earth nor hope in heaven, but doomed to wander up and down these livid crags for an eternity of woe. The mountain had already taken possession of our physical, now it seized upon our moral nature. Neither the one nor the other could resist the impressions which naked rock, furious tempest, and hidden danger stamped on every foot of the way.

In this way we reached Mount Monroe, last of the peaks in our route to the summit, where we were forced to pick our way among the rocks, struggling forward through drifts frequently waist deep.

It was here that, finding myself some distance in advance of the others – for poor George was lagging painfully – I halted for them to come up. I was choking with thirst, aggravated by eating the damp snow. As soon as the colonel was near enough – the wind only could be heard – I made a gesture of a man drinking. He did not seem to understand, though I impatiently repeated the pantomime. He came to where I stood.

“The flask!” I exclaimed.

He drew it slowly from his pocket, and handed it to me with a hang-dog look that I failed for the moment to interpret. I put it to my lips, shook it, turned it bottom up. Not a drop!

And, nevertheless, this was the man in whom I had trusted. Cæsar only succumbed to the dagger of Brutus; but I had not the courage to fall with dignity under this new misfortune, and so stood staring at the flask and the culprit alternately.

“Say that our cup is now full,” suggested the incorrigible George. “The paradox strikes me as ingenious and appropriate.”

It really was too bad. Snow and sleet had wet us to the skin, and clung to our frozen garments. Our hands and faces were swollen and inflamed; our eyes half closed and blood-shot. Even this short minute’s halt set our teeth chattering. George could only limp along, and it was evident could not hold out much longer. Just now my uneasiness was greater than my sympathy. He was an accessory before the fact; for, while I was diligently looking out the path, he had helped the colonel to finish the flask.

We were nearing the goal: so much was certain. But the violence of the gale, increasing with the greater altitude, warned us against delay. We therefore pushed on across the stony terraces extending beyond, and were at length rewarded by seeing before us the heaped-up pile of broken granite constituting the peak of Washington, and which we knew still rose a thousand feet above our heads. The sight of this towering mass, which seems formed of the débris of the Creation, is well calculated to stagger more adventurous spirits than the three weary and foot-sore men who stood watching the cloud-billows, silently rolling up, dash themselves unceasingly against its foundations. We looked first at the mountain, then in each other’s faces, then began the ascent.

For near an hour we toiled upward, sometimes up to the middle in snow, always carefully feeling our way among the treacherous pitfalls it concealed. Compelled to halt every few rods to recover breath, the distance traversed could not be great. Still, with dogged perseverance, we kept on, occasionally lending each other a helping hand out of a drift, or from rock to rock; but no words were exchanged, for the stock of gayety with which we set out was now exhausted. The gravity of the situation began to create uneasiness in the minds of my companions. All at once I heard my name called out. I turned. It was the colonel, whose halloo in midst of this stony silence startled me.

“You pretend,” he began, “that it’s only a thousand feet from the plateau to the top of this accursed mountain?”

“No more, no less. Professor Guyot assures us of the fact.”

“Well, then, here we have been zigzagging about for a good hour, haven’t we?”

“An hour and twenty minutes,” said I, consulting my watch.

“And not a sign of the houses or the railway, or any other creeping thing. Do you want my opinion?”

“Charmed.”

“We have passed the houses without seeing them in the storm, and are now on the side of the mountain opposite from where we started.”

“So that you conclude – ?”

“We are lost.”

This was, of course, mere guesswork; but we had no compass, and might be travelling in the wrong direction, after all. A moment’s reflection, however, reassured me. “Is that your opinion, too, George?” I asked.

George had taken off his boot, and was chafing his swollen ankle. He looked up.

“My opinion is that I don’t know anything about it; but as you got us into this scrape, you had better get us out of it, and be spry about it too, for the deuce take me if I can go much farther.”

“Why,” croaked the colonel, “I recollect hearing of a traveller who, like us, actually walked by the Summit House without seeing it, when he was hailed by a man who, by mere accident, chanced to be outside, and who imagined he saw something moving in the fog. In five minutes the stranger would inevitably have walked over a precipice with his eyes open.”

“And I remember seeing on the wall of the tavern where we stopped, at Bartlett, a placard offering a reward for a man who, like us, set out from Crawford’s, and was never heard of,” George put in.10

“And I read of one who, like us, almost reached the summit, but mistaking a lower peak for the pinnacle, losing his head, crawled, exhausted, under a rock to die there,” I finished, firing the last shot.

Without another word both my comrades grappled vigorously with the mountain, and for ten minutes nothing was heard but our labored breathing. On whatever side we might be, so long as we continued to ascend I had little fear of being in the wrong road. Our affair was to get to the top.

At the end of ten minutes we came suddenly upon a walled enclosure, which we conjectured to be the corral at the end of the bridle-path. We hailed it like an oasis in the midst of this desert. We entered, brushed the snow from a stone, and sat down.

Up to this time my umbrella had afforded a good deal of merriment to my companions, who could not understand why I encumbered myself with it on a day which began as this one did, perfectly clear and cloudless. Since the storm came on, the force of the wind would at any time have lifted off his feet the man who attempted to spread it, and even if it had not, as well might one have walked blindfolded in that treacherous road as with an open umbrella before him. Now it was my turn, or, rather, the turn of the abused umbrella. A few moments of rest were absolutely necessary; but the wind cut like a cimeter, and we felt ourselves freezing. I opened the umbrella, and, protected by it from the wind, we crouched under its friendly shelter, and lighted our cigars. Never before did I know the luxury of a smoke like that.

“Now,” said I, complacently glancing up at our tent, “ever since I read how an umbrella saved a man’s life, I determined never to go on a mountain without one.”

“An umbrella! How do you make that out?” demanded both my auditors.

“It is very simple. He was lost on this very mountain, under conditions similar to those we are now experiencing, except that his carrying an umbrella was an accident, and that he was alone. He passed two nights under it. But the story will keep.”

It may well be imagined that we had not the least disposition to be merry; yet for all that there was something irresistibly comical in three men sitting with their feet in the snow, and putting their heads together under a single umbrella. Various were the conjectures. We could hear nothing but the rushing wind, see nothing but driving sleet. George believed we were still half a mile from the summit; the colonel was not able to precisely fix his opinion, but thought us still a long way off. After diligent search, in which we all joined, I succeeded in finding something like a path turning to the right, and we again resumed our slow clambering over the rocks.

Perhaps ten minutes passed thus, when we again halted and peered anxiously into the whirling vapor – nothing, neither monument nor stone, to indicate where we were. A new danger confronted us; one I had hitherto repulsed because I dared not think of it. The light was failing, and darkness would soon be here. God help any that this night surprised on the mountain! While we eagerly sought on all sides some evidence that human feet had ever passed that way, a terrific blast, that seemed to concentrate the fury of the tempest in one mighty effort, dashed us helpless upon the rocks. For some seconds we were blinded, and could only crouch low until its violence subsided. But as the monstrous wave recoiled from the mountain, a piercing cry brought us quickly to our feet.

“Look!” shouted George, waving his hat like a madman – “look there!” he repeated.

Vaguely, through the tattered clouds, like a wreck driving miserably before the tempest, we distinguished a building propped up by timbers crusted with thick ice. The gale shook and beat upon it with demoniacal glee, but never did weary eyes rest on a more welcome object. For ten seconds, perhaps, we held it in view; then, in a twinkling, the clouds rolled over it, shut together, and it was gone – swallowed up in the vortex.

A moment of bewilderment succeeded, after which we made a simultaneous rush in the direction of the building. In five minutes more we were within the hotel, thawing our frozen clothing before a rousing fire.

It provokes a smile when I think of it. Here, in this frail structure, perched like another Noah’s Ark on its mountain, and which every gust threatened to scatter to the winds of heaven, a grand piano was going in the parlor, a telegraphic instrument clicked in a corner, and we sat down to a ménu that made the colonel forget the loss of his hat.

“By the bones of Daniel Boone! I can say as Napoleon did on the Great St. Bernard, ‘I have spoiled a hat among your mountains; well, I shall find a new one on the other side,’” observed the colonel, uncorking a second bottle of champagne.

SECOND JOURNEY

I.

LEGENDS OF THE CRYSTAL HILLS

My lord, I will hoist saile; and all the windMy bark can beare shall hasten me to findA great new world. – Sir W. Davenant.

WHEN Cabot, in the Mathew, of Bristol, was sailing by the New England coast, and the amazed savage beheld a pyramid of white sails rising, like a cloud, out of the sea, the navigator saw from the deck of his ship, rising out of the land, a cluster of lofty summits cut like a cameo on the northern sky.

The Indian left his tradition of the marvellous apparition, which he at first believed to be a mass of trees wrapped in faded foliage, drifting slowly at the caprice of the waves; but, as he gazed, fire streamed from the strange object, a cloud shut it from his view, and a peal like distant thunder was wafted on the breeze to his startled ears. That peal announced the doom of his race. He was looking at the first ship.

Succeeding navigators, Italians, Portuguese, French, English – a roll of famous names – sailed these seas, and, in their turn, hailed the distant summits. They became the great distinguishing landmarks of this corner of the New World. They are found on all the maps traced by the early geographers from the relations of the discoverers themselves. Having thus found form and substance, they also found a name – the Mountains of St. John.

Ships multiplied. Men of strange garb, speech, complexion, erected their habitations along the coast, the unresisting Indian never dreaming that the thin line which the sea had cast up would speedily rise to an inundation destined to sweep him from the face of the earth. Then began that steady advance, slow at first, gathering momentum with the years, before which he recoiled step by step, and finally disappeared forever. His destiny was accomplished. To-day only mountains and streams transmit to us the certainty that he ever did exist. They are his monument, his lament, his eternal accusation.

The White Mountains stood for the Indian not only as an image, but as the actual dwelling-place of Omnipotence. His dreaded Manitou, whose voice was the thunder, whose anger the lightning, and on whose face no mortal could look and live, was the counterpart of the terrible Thor, the Icelandic god, throned in a palace of ice among frozen and inaccessible mountain peaks, over which he could be heard urging his loud chariot amid the rage of the tempest. Frost and fire, plague and famine were the terrific natural agents common to the Indian and to the Norse mythology; and to his god of terrors the Indian conjurer addressed his prayers, his incantations, and his propitiatory offerings, when some calamity had befallen or threatened his tribe. But to cross the boundary which separated him from the abiding-place of the Manitou! plant his audacious foot within the region from which Nature shrunk back affrighted! Not all the wealth he believed the mountain hoarded would have tempted him to brave the swift and terrible vengeance of the justly offended, all-powerful Manitou. So far, then, as he was concerned, the mountain remained inviolate, inviolable, as a kind of hell, filled with the despairing shrieks of those who in an evil hour transgressed the limits sacred to immortals.11

As a pendant to this superstition, in which their deity is with simple grandeur throned on the highest mountain peak, it is curious to remember the Indian tradition of the Deluge; for, like so many peoples, they had their tradition, coming from a remote time, and having strong family resemblance with that of more enlightened nations. According to it, all the inhabitants of the earth were drowned, except one Powaw and his wife, who were preserved by climbing to the top of the White Mountains, and who were the progenitors of the subsequent races of man. The Powaw took with him a hare, which, upon the subsiding of the waters, he freed, as Noah did the dove, seeing in its prolonged absence the assurance that he and his companion might safely descend to earth. The likeness of this tradition with the story of Deucalion, and Pyrrha, his wife, as related by Ovid, is very striking. One does not easily consent to refer it to accident alone.

There is one thing more. When asked by the whites to point out the Indian’s heaven, the savage stretched his arm in the direction of the White Hills, and replied that heaven was just beyond. Such being his religion, and such the influence of the mountain upon this highly imaginative, poetic, natural man, one finds himself drawn legitimately in the train of those marvels which our ancestors considered the most credible things in the world, and which the sceptical cannot explain by a sneer.

According to the Indians, on the highest mountain, suspended from a crag overlooking a dismal lake, was an enormous carbuncle, which many declared they had seen blazing in the night like a live coal. Some even asserted that its ruddy glare lighted the livid rocks around like the fire of a midnight encampment, while by day it emitted rays, like the sun, dazzling to look upon. And this extraordinary sight they declared they had not only seen, but seen again and again.

It is true that the Indians did not hesitate to declare that no mortal hand could hope to grasp the great fire-stone. It was, said they, in the special guardianship of the genius of the mountain, who, on the approach of human footsteps, troubled the waters of the lake, causing a dark mist to rise, in which the venturesome mortal became bewildered, and then hopelessly lost. Several noted conjurers of the Pigwackets, rendered foolhardy by their success in exorcising evil spirits, so far conquered their fears as to ascend the mountain; but they never returned, and had, no doubt, expiated their folly by being transformed into stone, or flung headlong down some stark and terrible precipice.

This tale of the great carbuncle fired the imagination of the simple settlers to the highest pitch. We believe what we wish to believe, and, notwithstanding their religion refused to admit the existence of the Indian demon, its guardian, they seem to have had little difficulty in crediting the reality of the jewel itself. At any rate, the belief that the mountain shut up precious mines has come down to our own day; we are assured by a learned historian of fifty years ago that the story of the great carbuncle still found full credence in his.12 We are now acquainted with the spirit of the time when the first attempt to scale the mountain, known to us, was rewarded with complete success. But the record is of exasperating brevity.

Among the earliest settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, was a man by the name of Darby Field. The antecedents of this obscure personage are securely hidden behind the mists of more than two centuries.

A hundred and twenty-five years before the ascent of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat, Darby Field successfully ascended to the summit of the “White Hill,” to-day known as Mount Washington; but the exploit of the adventurous Irishman is far more remarkable in its way than that of the brave Swiss, since he had to make his way for eighty miles through a wilderness inhabited only by beasts of prey, or by human beings scarcely less savage, before he reached the foot of the great range; while Balmat lived under the very shadow of the monarch of the Alps, so that its spectre was forever crossing his path. Furthermore, the greater part of the ascent of Mont Blanc was already familiar ground to the guides and chamois-hunters of the Swiss Alps. On the contrary, according to every probability, Field was the first human being whose daring foot invaded the hitherto inviolable seclusion of the illustrious hermit of New England.

For such an adventure one instinctively seeks a motive. I did not long amuse myself with the idea that this explorer climbed merely for the sake of climbing; and I have little notion that he dreamed of posthumous renown. It is far more probable that the reports brought by the Indians of the fabulous treasures of the mountains led to Field’s long, arduous, and really perilous journey. It is certain that he was possessed of rare intrepidity, as well as the true craving for adventure. That goes without saying; still, the whole undertaking – its inception, its pursuit to the end in the face of extraordinary obstacles, which he had no means of measuring or anticipating – announces a very different sort of man from the ordinary, a purpose before which all dangers disappear.

In June, 1642, that is to say, only twelve years after the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts Bay, Field set out from the sea-coast for the White Hills.

So far as known, he prosecuted his journey to the Indian village of Pigwacket, the existence of which is thus established, without noteworthy accident or adventure. Here he was joined by some Indians, who conducted him within eight miles of the summit, when, declaring that to go farther would expose them to the wrath of their great Evil Spirit, they halted, and refused to proceed. The brave Irishman was equal to the emergency. To turn back, baffled, within sight of his goal was evidently not an admitted contingency. Leaving the Indians, therefore, squatted upon the rocks, and no doubt regarding him as a man rushing upon a fool’s fate, Field again resolutely faced the mountain, when, seeing him equally unmoved by their warnings as unshaken in his determination to reach the summit, two of the boldest warriors ran after him, while the others stoically made their preparations to await a return which they never expected to take place. They watched the retreating figures until lost among the rocks.

In the language of the original narration, the rest of the ascent was effected by “a ridge between two valleys filled with snow, out of which came two branches of the Saco River, which met at the foot of the hill, where was an Indian town of two hundred people.” … “By-the-way, among the rocks, there were two ponds, one a blackish water, and the other reddish.”… “Within twelve miles of the top was neither tree nor grass, but low savins, which they went upon the top of sometimes.”