Others battled bravely with the bowling winds, which have stripped them bare on one side, while they seem to toss out their arms wildly on the other, imploring protection and aid from the valley-dwellers below. Up and up, and you come suddenly upon the "Silver Forest," a grove of dead white trees, naked of leaf and fruit and bud, bare of color, dry of sap and juice and life, retaining only their form,--cold set outline of their hale and hearty vigor; a skeleton plantation, bleaching in the frosty sun, yet mindful of its past existence, sturdy, and defiant of the woodman's axe; a frostwork mimicry of nature, a phantom forest. On and on, turning to overlook the path you have trodden, at every retrospect the struggle between life and death becomes more and more palpable. The Destroyer has hurled his winds, his frosts, his fires; and gray wastes, broken wastes, black wastes, attest with what signal power. But life follows closely, planting his seeds in the very footprints of death. Where blankness and bleakness seem to reign, a tiny life springs in mosses, rich with promise of better things. Long forked tongues of green are lapping up the dreary wastes, and will presently overpower them with its vivid tints. Even amid the blanched petrifaction of the Silver Grove fresh growths are creeping, and the day is not far distant that shall see those pale statues overtopped, submerged, lost in an emerald sea. Even among the rocks, the strife rages. Some mysterious principle inheres in the insensate rock, whose loss makes this crumbling, discolored, inert debris. Up you go, up and up, and life dies out. Chaos and ruin reign supreme.
Headlong steeps yawn beside your path, losing their depths in darkness. Great fragments of rock cover all the ground, lie heaped, pile upon pile, jagged, gray, tilted into a thousand sharp angles, refusing a foothold, or offering it treacherously.
Wild work has been here; and these gigantic wrecks bear silent witness of the uproar. It seems but a pause, not a peace.
Agiocochook, Great Mountain of Spirits, rendezvous of departed souls, clothed with the strength and fired with the passions of the gods,--in what caverns under the cliffs do the wearied Titans rest? From what dungeons of gloom emerging shall they renew their elemental strife? What shall be the sign of their awaking to darken the earth with their missiles and deafen the skies with their thunder? And what daring of man is this to scorn his smiling valleys and adventure up into these realms of storm? No Titan he, yet the truest Titan of all, for he wrestled and overcame. No giant he, yet grander than the giants, since without Pelion or Ossa he has scaled heaven. Through uncounted aeons the mountain has been gathering its forces. Frost and snow and ice and the willing winds have been its sworn retainers.
Cold and famine and death it flaunted in the face of the besieger.
Man is of a day, and the elements are but slippery allies. Aspade and a compass are his meagre weapons; yet man has conquered.
The struggle was long, with many a reconnaissance and partial triumph, but at length the victory is complete. Man has placed his hand on the monarch's mane. He has pierced leviathan with a hook. The secrets of the mountain are uncovered. His fastnesses conceal no treasures that shall not be spread out to the day. His bolts and bars of ice can no longer press back the foot of the invader. Yon gray and slender ribbon, that floats down his defiles, disappearing now over his ledges to reappear on some lower range, and he lightly across the plateau,--that is his bridle of submission, his badge of servitude. Obedient to that, he yields up his hoarded wealth and pays tribute, a vassal to his lord. Men and women and little children climb up his rugged sides, and the crown upon his beetling brows is set in the circle of humanity.
In the first depression of abandonment one loses heart, and sees only the abomination of desolation; but gradually the soul lifts itself from the barren earth, and floats out upon the ocean, in which one stands islanded on a gray rock, fixed in seas of sunshine.
Whether you shall have a fair day or a foul is as may be. At the mountain's base they discreetly promise you nothing. It may be sunny and sultry down there, while storms and floods have at it on the peak. But mine was a day of days,--clear, alternating with cloudy. When you had looked long enough to dazzle and weary your eyes, a cloud would come and fold you about with opaqueness, and while you waited in the cloud, lo here! lo there! it flashed apart and shimmered yonder a blue sky, a brilliant landscape, and the distant level of the sea;or slowly its whiteness cleaved and rolled away, revealing a glorified mountain, a lake lying in the shadows, or the simple glen far down from which we came. It was constant change and ever-new delight.
But this going up mountains is a bad thing for the clouds. All their fleecy softness, all their pink and purple and pearly beauty, all the mystery of their unattainableness, is weighed in the balance and found to be fog, and by no means unapproachable. They will never impose upon us again. Never more will they ride through the serene blue, white-stoled cherubs of the sky. Henceforth there is very little sky about them. Sail away, little cloud, little swell, little humbug.
Make believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there, and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth and passion as we saw, but a gray little imp, cold at the heart, and malignant, and malignant, as we felt.
