Part 20

I left the Flume House in company with a young-old man, whom I met there, and in whom I hoped to find another and a surer pair of eyes, for, were he to have as many as Argus, the sight-seer would find employment for them all.

While gayly threading the green-wood, we came upon a miniature edition of the Pool, situated close to the highway, called the Basin. A basin in fact it is, and a bath fit for the gods. It is plain to see that the stream once poured over the smooth ledges here, instead of making its exit by the present channel. A cascade falls into it with hollow roar. This cistern has been worn by the rotary motion of large pebbles which the little cascade, pouring down into it from above, set and kept actively whirling and grinding at its own mad caprice. But this was not the work of a day. Long and constant attrition only could have scooped this cavity out of the granite, which is here so clean, smooth, and white, and filled to the brim with a grayish-emerald water, light, limpid, and incessantly replenished by the effervescent cascade. In the beginning this was doubtless an insignificant crevice, into which a few pebbles and a handful of sand were dropped by the stream, but which, having no way of escape, were kept in a perpetual tread-mill, until what was at first a mere hole became as we now see it. The really curious feature of the stone basin is a strip of granite projecting into it which closely resembles a human leg and foot, luxuriously cooling itself in the stream. Such queer freaks of nature are not merely curious, but they while away the hours so agreeably that time and distance are forgotten.

As we walked on, the hills were constantly hemming us in closer and closer. Suddenly we entered a sort of crater, with high mountains all around. One impulse caused us to halt and look about us. In full view at our left the inaccessible precipices of Mount Cannon rose above a mountain of shattered stones, which ages upon ages of battering have torn piecemeal from it. Its base was heaped high with these ruins. Seldom has it fallen to my lot to see anything so grandly typical of the indomitable as this sorely battered and disfigured mountain citadel, which nevertheless lifts and will still lift its unconquerable battlements so long as one stone remains upon another. Hewed and hacked, riven and torn, gashed and defaced in countless battles, one can hardly repress an emotion of pity as well as of admiration. I do not recollect, in all these mountains, another such striking example of the denuding forces with which they are perpetually at war. When we see mountains crumbling before our very eyes, may we not begin to doubt the stability of things that we are pleased to call eternal? Still, although it seems erected solely for the pastime of all the powers of destruction, this one, so glorious in its unconquerable resolve to die at its post--this one, exposing its naked breast to the fury of its deadliest foes--so stern and terrific of aspect, so high and haughty, so dauntlessly throwing down the gauntlet to Fate itself--assures us that the combat will be long and obstinate, and that the mountain will fall at last, if fall it must, with the grace and heroism of a gladiator in the Roman arena. The gale flies at it with a shriek of impotent rage. Winter strips off its broidered tunic and flings white dust in its aged face. Rust corrodes, rains drench, fires scorch it; lightning and frost are forever searching out the weak spots in its harness; but, still uplifting its adamantine crest, it receives unshaken the stroke or the blast, spurns the lightning, mocks the thunder, and stands fast. Underneath is a little lake, which at sunset resembles a pool of blood that has trickled drop by drop from the deep wounds in the side of the mountain.

We are still advancing in this region of wonders. In our front soars an insuperable mass of forest-shagged rock. Behind it rises the absolutely regal Lafayette. Our footsteps are stayed by the glimmer of water through trees by the road-side. We have reached the summit of the pass.

Six miles of continued ascent from the Flume House have brought us to Profile Lake, which the road skirts. Although a pretty enough piece of water, it is not for itself this lake is resorted to by its thousands, or for being the source of the Pemigewasset, or for its trout--which you take for the reflection of birds on its burnished surface--but for the mountain rising high above, whose wooded slopes it so faithfully mirrors. Now lift the eyes to the bare summit! It is difficult to believe the evidence of the senses! Upon the high cliffs of this mountain is the remarkable and celebrated natural rock sculpture of a human head, which, from a height twelve hundred feet above the lake, has for uncounted ages looked with the same stony stare down the pass upon the windings of the river through its incomparable valley. The profile itself measures about forty feet from the tip of the chin to the flattened crown which imparts to it such a peculiarly antique appearance. All is perfect, except that the forehead is concealed by something like the visor of a helmet. And all this illusion is produced by several projecting crags. It might be said to have been begotten by a thunder-bolt.

Taking a seat within a rustic arbor on the high shore of the lake, one is at liberty to peruse at leisure what, I dare say, is the most extraordinary sight of a lifetime. A change of position varies more or less the character of the expression, which is, after all, the marked peculiarity of this monstrous _alto relievo_; for let the spectator turn his gaze vacantly upon the more familiar objects at hand--as he inevitably will, to assure himself that he is not the victim of some strange hallucination--a fascination born neither of admiration nor horror, but strongly partaking of both emotions, draws him irresistibly back to the Dantesque head stuck, like a felon's, on the highest battlements of the pass. The more you may have seen, the more your feelings are disciplined, the greater the confusion of ideas. The moment is come to acknowledge yourself vanquished. This is not merely a face, it is a portrait. That is not the work of some cunning chisel, but a cast from a living head. You feel and will always maintain that those features have had a living and breathing counterpart. Nothing more, nothing less.

But where and what was the original prototype? Not man; since, ages before he was created, the chisel of the Almighty wrought this sculpture upon the rock above us. No, not man; the face is too majestic, too nobly grand, for anything of mortal mould. One of the antique gods may, perhaps, have sat for this archetype of the coming man. And yet not man, we think, for the head will surely hold the same strange converse with futurity when man shall have vanished from the face of the earth.

This gigantic silhouette, which has been dubbed the Old Man of the Mountain, is unquestionably the greatest curiosity of this or any other mountain region. It is unique. But it is not merely curious; nor is it more marvellous for the wonderful accuracy of outline than for the almost superhuman expression of frozen terror it eternally fixes on the vague and shadowy distance--a far-away look; an intense and speechless amazement, such as sometimes settles on the faces of the dying at the moment the soul leaves the body forever--untranslatable into words, but seeming to declare the presence of some unutterable vision, too bright and dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. The face puts the whole world behind it. It does everything but speak--nay, you are ready to swear that it is going to speak! And so this chance jumbling together of a few stones has produced a sculpture before which Art hangs her head.

I renounce in dismay the idea of reproducing the effect on the reader's mind which this prodigy produced on my own. Impressions more pronounced, yet at the same time more inexplicable, have never so effectually overcome that habitual self-command derived from many experiences of travel among strange and unaccustomed scenes. From the moment the startled eye catches it one is aware of a _Presence_ which dominates the spirit, first with strange fear, then by that natural revulsion which at such moments makes the imagination supreme, conducts straight to the supernatural, there to leave it helplessly struggling in a maze of impotent conjecture. But, even upon this debatable ground, between two worlds, one is not able to surprise the secret of those lips of marble. The Sphinx overcomes us by his stony, his disdainful silence. Let the visitor be ever so unimpassioned, surely he must be more than mortal to resist the impression of mingled awe, wonder, and admiration which a first sight of this weird object forces upon him. He is, indeed, less than human if the feeling does not continually grow and deepen while he looks. The face is so amazing, that I have often tried to imagine the sensations of him who first discovered it peering from the top of the mountain with such absorbed, open-mouthed wonder. Again I see the tired Indian hunter, pausing to slake his thirst by the lake-side, start as his gaze suddenly encounters this terrific apparition. I fancy the half-uttered exclamation sticking in his throat. I behold him standing there with bated breath, not daring to stir hand or foot, his white lips parted, his scared eyes dilated, until his own swarthy features exactly reflect that unearthly, that intense amazement stamped large and vivid upon the livid rock. There he remains, rooted to the spot, unable to reason, trembling in every limb. For him there are no accidents of nature; for him everything has its design. His moment of terrible suspense is hardly difficult to understand, seeing how careless thousands that come and go are thrilled, and awed, and silenced, notwithstanding you tell them the face is nothing but rocks.

If the effect upon minds of the common order be so pronounced, a first sight of the Great Stone Face may easily be supposed to act powerfully upon the imaginative and impressible. The novelist, Hawthorne, makes it the interpreter of a noble life. For him the Titanic countenance is radiant with majestic benignity. He endows it with a soul, surrounds the colossal brow with the halo of a spiritual grandeur, and, marshalling his train of phantoms, proceeds to pass inexorable judgment upon them. Another legend--like its predecessor, too long for our pages--runs to the effect that a painter who had resolved to paint Christ sitting in judgment, and who was filled with the grandeur of his subject, wandered up and down the great art palaces, the cathedrals of the Old World, seeking in vain a model which should in all things be the embodiment of his ideal. In despair at the futility of his search he hears a strange report, brought by some pious missionaries from the New World, of a wonderful image of the human face which the Indians looked upon with sacred veneration. The painter immediately crossed the sea, and caused himself to be guided to the spot, where he beheld, in the profile of the great White Mountains, the object of his search and fulfilment of his dream. The legend is entitled _Christus Judex._

Had Byron visited this place of awe and mystery, his "Manfred," the scene of which is laid among the mountains of the Bernese Alps, would doubtless have had a deeper and perhaps gloomier impulse; but even among the eternal realms of ice the poet never beheld an object that could so arouse the gloomy exaltation he has breathed into that tragedy. His line--

"Bound to earth, he lifts his eye to heaven"--

becomes descriptive here.

Again and again we turn to the face. We go away to wonder if it is still there. We come back to wonder still more. An emotion of pity mingles with the rest. Time seems to have passed it by. It seems undergoing some terrible sentence. It is a greater riddle than the gigantic stone face on the banks of the Nile.

All effects of light and shadow are so many changes of countenance or of expression. I have seen the face cut sharp and clear as an antique cameo upon the morning sky. I have seen it suffused, nay, almost transfigured, in the sunset glow. Often and often does a cloud rest upon its brow. I have seen it start fitfully out of the flying scud to be the next moment smothered in clouds. I have heard the thunder roll from its lips of stone. I recall the sunken cheeks, wet with the damps of its night-long vigil, glistening in the morning sunshine--smiling through tears. I remember its emaciated visage streaked and crossed with wrinkles that the snow had put there in a night; but never have I seen it insipid or commonplace. On the contrary, the overhanging brow, the antique nose, the protruding under-lip, the massive chin, might belong to another Prometheus chained to the rock, but whom no punishment could make lower his haughty head.

I lingered by the margin of the lake watching the play of the clouds upon the water, until a loud and resonant peal, followed by large, warm drops, admonished me to seek the nearest shelter. And what thunder! The hills rocked. What echoes! The mountains seemed knocking their stony heads together. What lightning! The very heavens cracked with the flashes.

"Far along From peak to peak the rattling crags among Leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud, But every mountain now hath found a tongue, And Jura answers, through her misty shroud, Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!"

III.

_THE KING OF FRANCONIA._

Hills draw like heaven And stronger, sometimes, holding out their hands To pull you from the vile flats up to them. E. B. BROWNING.

At noon we reached the spacious and inviting Profile House, which is hid away in a deep and narrow glen, nearly two thousand feet above the sea. No situation could be more sequestered or more charming. The place seems stolen from the unkempt wilderness that shuts it in. An oval, grassy plain, not extensive, but bright and smiling, spreads its green between a grisly precipice and a shaggy mountain. And there, if you-will believe me, in front of the long, white-columned hotel, like a Turkish rug on a carpet, was a pretty flower-garden. Like those flowers on the lawn were beauties sauntering up and down in exquisite morning toilets, coquetting with their bright-colored parasols, and now and then glancing up at the grim old mountains with that air of elegant disdain which is so redoubtable a weapon--even in the mountains. Little children fluttered about the grass like beautiful butterflies, and as unmindful of the terrors that hovered over them so threateningly. Nurses in their stiff grenadier caps and white aprons, lackeys in livery, cadets in uniform, elegant equipages, blooded horses, dainty shapes on horseback, cavaliers, and last, but not least, the resolute pedestrian, or the gentlemen strollers up and down the shaded avenues, made up a scene as animated as attractive. There is tonic in the air: there is healing in the balm of these groves. Even the horses step out more briskly. Peals of laughter startle the solemn old woods. You hear them high up the mountain side. There go a pair of lovers, the gentleman with his book, whose most telling passages he has carefully conned, the lady with her embroidery, over which she bends lower as he reads on. Ah, happy days! What is this youth, which, having it, we are so eager to escape, and, when it is gone, we look back upon with such longing?

The lofty crag opposite the hotel is Eagle Cliff, a name at once legitimate and satisfying, although it is now untenanted by the eagles which formerly made their home in the security of its precipitous rocks. The cliff is also seen to great advantage from Echo Lake, half a mile farther on, of which it constitutes a striking feature. In simple parlance it is an advanced spur of Mount Lafayette. The high and curving wall of this cliff encloses on one side the Profile Glen, while Mount Cannon forms the other. The precipices tower so far above the glen that large trees look like shrubs. Behind Eagle Cliff, almost isolating it from the mountain, of which it is the barbacan, a hideous ravine yawns upon the pass. Here and there, among the thick-set evergreen trees, beech and birch and maple, spread masses of rich green, and mottle it with softness. The purple rock bulges daringly out, forming a parapet of adamant.

The turf underneath the cliff was most beautifully and profusely spangled with the delicate pink anemone, the _fleur des fées_, that pale darling of our New England woods, to which the arbutus resigns the sceptre of spring. It is a moving sight to see these little drooping flowers, so shy and modest, yet so meek and trustful, growing at the foot of a bare and sterile rock. The face hardened looking up; grew soft looking down. "Don't tread on us!" "May not a flower look up at a mountain?" they seem to plead. Lightly fall the dews upon your upturned faces, dear little flowers! Soft be the sunshine and gentle the winds that kiss those sky-tinted cheeks! In thy sweet purity and innocence I see faces that are beneath the sod, flowers that have blossomed in Paradise.

We see also, from the hotel, the singular rock that occasioned the change of name from Profile to Cannon Mountain. It nearly resembles a piece of heavy ordnance protruding, threateningly, from the parapet of a fortress.

Taking one of the well-worn paths conducting to the water-side, a few minutes' walk brings us to the shore of Echo Lake, with Eagle Cliff now rising grandly on our right. Nowhere among the White Hills is there a fuller realization of a mountain lake than this. Light flaws frost it with silver. Sharp keels cut it as diamonds cut glass. The water is so transparent that you see fishes swimming or floating indolently about.

Echo Lake is somewhat larger than Profile Lake, and is only a step from the road. Its sources are in the hundred streams that descend the surrounding mountains, and its waters are discharged by the valley, lying between us and the heights of Bethlehem, into the Ammonoosuc. Therefore, in coming from one lake to the other we have crossed the summit of the pass. On one side the waters flow to the Merrimac, on the other to the Connecticut. An idle fancy tempted me to bring a cup of water from Profile and cast it into Echo Lake, forgetting that, although divided in their lives, the twin lakes had yet a common destiny in the abyss of the ocean. I found the outlook from the boat-house on the whole the most satisfying, because one looks back directly through the deep chasm of the Notch.

In this beautiful little mountain-tarn the true artist finds his ideal. The snowy peak of Lafayette looked down into it with a freezing stare. Cannon Mountain now showed his retreating wall on the right. The huge, castellated rampart of Eagle Cliff lifted on its borders precipices dripping with moisture, and glistening in the sun like casements. Except for the lake, the whole aspect would be irredeemably savage and forbidding--a blind landscape; but when the sun sinks behind the long ridge of Mount Cannon, purpling all these grisly crags, and the cloaked shadows, groping their way foot by foot up the ravines, seem spectres risen from the depths of the lake, you see, underneath the cliffs, long and slender spears of golden light thrust deep into its black and glossy tide, crimsoning it as with its own life-blood. Then, too, is the proper moment for surprising these vain old mountains viewing themselves in their mountain mirror, in which the bald, the wrinkled, and the decrepit appear young, vigorous, and gloriously fair; to see them gloating over their swarthy features like the bandit in "Fra Diavolo." Their ragged mantles are changed to gaudy cashmeres, picturesquely twisted about their brawny shoulders, their snows to laces. Oh the pomp, the majesty of these sunsets, which so glorify the upturned faces of the haggard cliffs; which transmute, as in the miracle, water into wine; which instantly transform these rugged mountain walls into gates of jasper, and ruby, and onyx--glowing, effulgent, enrapturing! And then, after the sun drops wearily down the west, that gauze-like vapor, spun from the breath of evening, rising like incense from the surface of the lake, which the mountains put on for the masque of night; and, finally, the inquisitive stars piercing the lake with ice-cold gleams, or the full-moon breaking in one great burst of splendor on its level surface!

The echo adds its feats of ventriloquism. The marvel of the phonograph is but a mimicry of Nature, the universal teacher. Now the man blows a strong, clear blast upon a long Alpine horn, and, like a bugle-call flying from camp to camp, the martial signal is repeated, not once, but again and again, in waves of bewitching sweetness and with the exquisite modulations of the wood-thrush's note. From covert to covert, now here, now there, it chants its rapturous melody. Once again it glides upon the entranced ear, and still we lean in breathless eagerness to catch the last faint cadence sighing itself away upon the palpitating air. A cannon was then fired. The report and echo came with the flash. In a moment more a deep and hollow rumbling sound, as if the mountains were splitting their huge sides with suppressed laughter, startled us.

The ascent of Mount Lafayette fittingly crowns the series of excursions through which we have passed since leaving Plymouth. This mountain dominates the valleys north and south with undisputed sway. It is the King of Franconia.

At seven in the morning I crossed the little clearing, and, turning into the path leading to the summit, found myself at the beginning of a steep ascent. It was one of the last and fairest days of that bright season which made the poet exclaim,

"And what is so fair as a day in June?"

The thunder-storm of the previous afternoon, which continued its furious cannonade at intervals throughout the night, had purified the air and given promise of a day favorable for the ascension. No clouds were upon the mountains. Everything betokened a pacific disposition.

The path at once attacks the south side of Eagle Cliff. A short way up, openings afford fine views of Mount Cannon and its weird profile, of the valley below, and of the glen we have just left. The stupendous mass of Eagle Cliff, suspended a thousand feet over your head, accelerates the pace.