Part 5 (2/2)

It was about the first of September; no rain had fallen for several weeks, and this heart of the forest was as dry as tinder; a lighted ration This dryness has its advantages: the walking is i heat has expressed all the spicy odors of the cedars and balsarance; the waters of the streah scant and clear, are cold as ice; the coht; there was a feeling of exultation and adventure in stepping off into the open but pathless forest; the great steht, which brought out upon the variegated barks andhues There is nothing like a prireen and brown are infinite; the dull red of the he s here and there; and everywhere the colureen which supports the intense blue sky and holds up a part of it froments to the floor of the forest Decorators can learn here how Nature dares to put blue and green in juxtaposition: she has evidently the secret of har all the colors

The way, as we ascended, was not all through open woods; dense ed spurs were to be crossed, and the going becath so slow and toilsome that we took to the rocky bed of a stream, where bowlders and flumes and cascades offered us sufficient variety The deeper we penetrated, the greater the sense of savageness and solitude; in the silence of these hidden places one seeed from the defile into an open basin, formed by the curved side of thedown out of the sky in the centre of the curve I do not know anything exactly like this fall, which some poetical explorer has naht of so like a hundred and fifty feet, and the water falls obliquely across the face of the cliff froht seem like a veritable ladder for fairies Our i the very steep slope at its side some three or four hundred feet At the top we found the strea over a broad bed of rock, like a street in the wilderness, slanting up still towards the sky, and bordered by low firs and balsams, and bowlders completely covered with moss It was above the world and open to the sky

On account of the tindery condition of the woods we made our fire on the natural pavement, and selected a smooth place for our bed near by on the flat rock, with a pool of liranite couch we covered with the dry and springy moss, which we stripped off in heavy fleeces a foot thick from the bowlders First, however, we fed upon the fruit that was offered us Over these hills of reen leaf, bearing s a faint flavor of wintergreen and the slightest acid taste, the very essence of the wilderness; fairy food, no doubt, and too refined for palates accustomed to coarser viands There must exist somewhere sinless wo reminded of the lost purity and delicacy of the primeval senses

Every year I doubt not this stainless berry ripens here, and is unplucked by any knight of the Holy Grail who is worthy to eat it, and keeps alive, in the prodigality of nature, the tradition of the unperverted conditions of taste before the fall We ate these berries, I auilty enjoyment, as if they had been a sort of shew-bread of the wilderness, though I cannot answer for the chaplain, who is by virtue of his office a little nearer to these s to the heath family, and is first cousin to the blueberry and cranberry It is co sobrry, but I like better its official title of chiogenes,--the snow-born

Our -place was named the Bridal Chamber Camp, in the enthusiasm of the hour, after darkness fell upon the woods and the stars came out We were two thousand five hundred feet above the common world

We lay, as it were, on a shelf in the sky, with a basin of illimitable forests below us and dim mountain-passes-in the far horizon

And as we lay there courting sleep which the blinking stars refused to shower down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire, which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent eleoes in aup and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a s ”That flaone?” We could not say, nor whether it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour, and then vanishes away Our own philosophy of the correlation of forces found no sort of favor at that elevation, and ent to sleep leaving the principle of fire in the apostolic category of ”any other creature”

At daylight ere astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire into our service to uished it or sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the cli over two thousand feet The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine peak has a colory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple Top had no stimulus of this sort It is siet the approbation of the individual conscience that drives them to the task The pleasure of such an ascent is difficult to explain on the spot, and I suspect consists not so ht theover the body I do not object to the elevation of this rade by which it attains it, but only to the other obstacles thrown in the way of the clied to the last degree Granite ledges interpose; granite bowlders seem to have been duement than in a rip-rap wall; the slashes and windfalls of a century present here and there an almost impenetrable chevalier des arbres; and the steep sides bristle with aspikes, as unyielding as iron stakes The mountain has had its oay forever, and is as untahtful te sun, and the avalanches have had their ith it until its surface is in hopeless confusion We made our way very slowly; and it was ten o'clock before we reached what appeared to be the sue deeply covered with moss, low balsams, and blueberry-bushes

I say, appeared to be; for we stood in thick fog or in the heart of clouds which limited our dim view to a radius of twenty feet It was a war, shi+fting, and boiling as by its own volatile nature, rolling up black fro it could not have been i the landscape it was a failure and we lay down upon the Sybarite couch of moss, as in a Russian bath, to await revelations

We waited two hours without change, except an occasional hopeful lightness in the fog above, and at last the appearance for a moment of the spectral sun Only for an instant was this luminous promise vouchsafed But atched in intense excite was so thin overhead that we caught sight of a patch of blue sky a yard square, across which the curtain was instantly drawn A little as stirring, and the fog boiled up from the valley caldrons thicker than ever But the spell was broken In a , ”The sun!” and before we could gain our feet there was a patch of sky overhead as big as a far like a lunatic There was a rift in the vapor at our feet, down, down, three thousand feet into the forest abyss, and lo!

lifting out of it yonder the tawny side of Dix,--the vision of a second, snatched away in the rolling fog The play had just begun Before we could turn, there was the gorge of Caribou Pass, savage and dark, visible to the botto over the clouds, miles a the peaceful farms of the Au Sable Valley, and in a moment more the plateau of North Elba and the sentinel liain isolated in the sea of mist The expectation of these sudden strokes of sublily on the alert; and yet it was a blow of surprise when the curtain iftly withdrawn on the west, and the long ridge of Colvin, seely within a stone's throw, heaved up like an island out of the ocean, and was the next er for Dix to show its shapely peak and its glistening sides of rock gashed by avalanches The fantastic clouds, torn and strea, hurried up fro and disclosing the great suht The mist boiled up from the valley, whirled over the suain into the depths Objects were for, now in sun and now gone in fog, and in the eleinal process of creation The sun strove, and his very striving called up new vapors; the wind rent away the clouds, and brought new ht and left, above and below, changed with incredible swiftness Such glory of abyss and suranted to mortal eyes For an hour atched it until our vastspurs, its abysses and its savagery, and the great basins of wilderness with their shi+ning lakes, and the giant peaks of the region, were one by one disclosed, and hidden and again tranquil in the sunshi+ne

Where was the cave? There was ample surface in which to look for it If we could have flitted about, like the hawks that ca spurs, the jagged precipices, I have no doubt we should have found it Butabout on this mountain is not a holiday pastime; and ere chiefly anxious to discover a practicable reat wilderness basin on the south, which wethe hospitable shanty on Mud Pond It was enough for us to have discovered the general whereabouts of the Spanish Cave, and we left the fixing of its exact position to future explorers

The spur we chose for our escape looked s with obstructions, dead balsaether, slashes of fallen tith ung and tued only forThe slope for a couple of thousand feet was steep enough; but it was for could not be deterht in holes under the treacherous carpeting Add to this that steitudinally and transversely and criss-cross over and aood deal of work needs to be done tobut a squirrel

We had had no water since our daylight breakfast: our lunch on the an to be that of Tantalus, because we could hear the water running deep down aination drank the living streaination furnishes in an actual strait A good deal of the crime of this world, I am convinced, is the direct result of the unlicensed play of the iination in adverse circu to do with our actual situation; for we added to our i, and probably all the Christian virtues would have been developed in us if the descent had been long enough

Before we reached the bottom of Caribou Pass, the water burst out from the rocks in a clear stream that was as cold as ice Shortly after, we struck the roaring brook that issues from the Pass to the south It is a streaable even for trout in the upper part, but a succession of falls, cascades, fluht an artist It is not an easy bed for anything except water to descend; and before we reached the level reaches, where the streah open woods, one of our party began to show signs of exhaustion

This was Old Phelps, whose appetite had failed the day before,--his i order than his storoggy that he was obliged to rest at short intervals Here was a situation! The afternoon earing away We had six or seven miles of unknoilderness to traverse, a portion of it swaress of more than a uide compelled even a slower uide became disabled? We couldn't carry hiet assistance? The guide hieneral direction of our point of egress, and was entirely adequate to extricate hie was of that occult sort possessed by woodsmen which it is impossible to communicate Our object was to strike a trail that led froe, to an inlet on Mud Pond We knew that if we traveled southard far enough we must strike that trail, but how far? No one could tell If we reached that trail, and found a boat at the inlet, there would be only a row of a couple of miles to the house at the foot of the lake If no boat was there, then we h a cedar-swa We were short of supplies, for we had not expected to pass that night in the woods The pleasure of the excursion began to develop itself

We stuh a forest that began to seem endless as hour after hour passed, coes of the foothills to avoid the swaues into the firuide beca rests Food he could not eat; and tea, water, and even brandy he rejected Again and again the old philosopher, enfeebled by excessive exertion and illness, would collapse in a heap on the ground, an almost co of the day, and peered forward in vain for any sign of an open country At every brook we encountered, we suggested a halt for the night, while it was still light enough to select a ca-place, but the plucky old ht be only a quarter of a ain at a snail's pace His honor as a guide seemed to be at stake; and, besides, he confessed to a notion that his end was near, and he didn't want to die like a dog in the woods And yet, if this was his last journey, it see for the old woodshost in the midst of the untamed forest and the solemn silences he felt most at home in There is a popular theory, held by civilians, that a soldier likes to die in battle I suppose it is as true that a woodsure seems to be inevitable, struck down by illness and exposure, in the forest solitude, with heaven in sight and a tree-root for his pillow

The guide seeet out of the woods that night, he would never go out; and, yielding to his dogged resolution, we kept on in search of the trail, although the gathering of dusk over the ground warned us that weit We were traveling by the light in the upper sky, and by the forrew dimmer At last the end came We had just felt our way over what seemed to be a little run of water, when the old ht as well die here as anywhere,” and was silent

Suddenly night fell like a blanket on us We could neither see the guide nor each other We becaht on all sides shut us in The sky was clouded over: there wasn't a gleaht was to build a fire, which would drive back the thick darkness into the woods, and boil some water for our tea But it was too dark to use the axe We scraped together leaves and twigs to make a blaze, and, as this failed, such dead sticks as we could find by groping about The fire was only a temporary affair, but it sufficed to boil a can of water The water we obtained by feeling about the stones of the little run for an opening big enough to dip our cup in The supper to be prepared was fortunately simple It consisted of a decoction of tea and other leaves which had got into the pail, and a part of a loaf of bread A loaf of bread which has been carried in a knapsack for a couple of days, bruised and handled and hacked at with a hunting-knife, beco object

But we ate of it with thankfulness, washed it doith hot fluid, and bitterly thought of the ht?

Would he be in any condition to travel in the et out with him or without hiht, and desired only to be let alone We tried to tempt him with the offer of a piece of toast: it was no teht would revive him: he refused it A drink of brandy would certainly quicken his life: he couldn't touch it

We were at the end of our resources He seeet a bit of fried bacon, or a piece of pie, he should be all right We knew no more how to doctor him than if he had been a sick bear He withdreithin himself, rolled himself up, so to speak, in his pri power of nature Before our feeble fire disappeared, we sot him over to it But it didn't suit: it was too open In fact, at the moment some drops of rain fell

Rain was quite outside of our prograuide had an instinct about it; and, while ere groping about some yards distant for a place where we could lie down, he crawled away into the darkness, and curled hiantic pine, very ainst the trunk, and there passed the night co till , and had to trust to the assurance of a voice out of the darkness that he was all right

Our own bed where we spread our blankets was excellent in one respect,--there was no danger of tuently on the leaves overhead, and we congratulated ourselves on the snugness of our situation There was so cheerful about this free life We contrasted our condition with that of tired invalids ere tossing on downy beds, and wooing sleep in vain Nothing was so wholeso as this bivouac in the forest But, somehow, sleep did not coan to fall with a steady determination, a sort of soak, soak, all about us In fact, it roared on the rubber blanket, and beat in our faces The wind began to stir a little, and there was a , the rain was driven into our faces Another suspicious circuot established along the sides under the blankets, cold, undeniable streams, that interfered with drowsiness Pools of water settled on the bed; and the chaplain had a habit ofa quart or two inside, and down an to be evident that we and our bed were probably the wettest objects in the woods The rubber was an excellent catch-all

There was no trouble about ventilation, but we found that we had established our quarters without any provision for drainage There was not exactly a wild teree of liveliness in the thrashi+ng liainst each other, and the pouring rain increased in volume and power of penetration Sleep was quite out of the question, with so much to distract our attention In fine, our misery became so perfect that we both broke out into loud and sarcastic laughter over the absurdity of our situation We had subjected ourselves to all this forlornness simply for pleasure Whether Old Phelps was still in existence, we couldn't tell: we could get no response froht, if he continued ill and could not move, our situation would be little ie of water was pouring down on us This was su was so excessively absurd that we laughed again, louder than ever We had plenty of this sort of aht we heard a sort of reply that started us bolt upright This was a prolonged squawk It was like the voice of no beast or bird hich ere familiar At first it was distant; but it rapidly approached, tearing through the night and apparently through the tree-tops, like the harsh cry of a web-footed bird with a snarl in it; in fact, as I said, a squawk It came close to us, and then turned, and as rapidly as it cah the forest, and we lost the unearthly noise far up the mountain-slope

”What was that, Phelps?” we cried out But no response came; and ondered if his spirit had been rent away, or if soht it, and then, baffled by his serene and philosophic spirit, had shot off into the void in rage and disappointth co up behind the clouds lent a spectral aspect to the forest, and deceived us for a time into the notion that day was at hand; but the rain never ceased, and we lay wishful and waiting, with no ite that we could conceive