The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains Read online

of pine-tree shillings. By his long absence,moreover, his affairs had become so disordered that, for the rest of hislife, instead of wallowing in silver, he had seldom a sixpence worthof copper. Doctor Cacaphodel, the alchemist, returned to his laboratorywith a prodigious fragment of granite, which he ground to powder,dissolved in acids, melted in the crucible, and burned with theblow-pipe, and published the result of his experiments in one of theheaviest folios of the day. And, for all these purposes, the gem itselfcould not have answered better than the granite. The poet, by a somewhatsimilar mistake, made prize of a great piece of ice, which he found ina sunless chasm of the mountains, and swore that it corresponded, in allpoints, with his idea of the Great Carbuncle. The critics say, that, ifhis poetry lacked the splendor of the gem, it retained all the coldnessof the ice. The Lord de Vere went back to his ancestral hall, wherehe contented himself with a wax-lighted chandelier, and filled, in duecourse of time, another coffin in the ancestral vault. As the funeraltorches gleamed within that dark receptacle, there was no need of theGreat Carbuncle to show the vanity of earthly pomp.

  The Cynic, having cast aside his spectacles, wandered about the world,a miserable object, and was punished with an agonizing desire of light,for the wilful blindness of his former life. The whole night long, hewould lift his splendor-blasted orbs to the moon and stars; he turnedhis face eastward, at sunrise, as duly as a Persian idolater; he madea pilgrimage to Rome, to witness the magnificent illumination of St.Peter's Church; and finally perished in the great fire of London, intothe midst of which he had thrust himself, with the desperate idea ofcatching one feeble ray from the blaze that was kindling earth andheaven.

  Matthew and his bride spent many peaceful years, and were fond oftelling the legend of the Great Carbuncle. The tale, however, towardsthe close of their lengthened lives, did not meet with the full credencethat had been accorded to it by those who remembered the ancient lustreof the gem. For it is affirmed that, from the hour when two mortals hadshown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel which would havedimmed all earthly things, its splendor waned. When other pilgrimsreached the cliff, they found only an opaque stone, with particles ofmica glittering on its surface. There is also a tradition that, as theyouthful pair departed, the gem was loosened from the forehead of thecliff, and fell into the enchanted lake, and that, at noontide, theSeeker's form may still be seen to bend over its quenchless gleam.

  Some few believe that this inestimable stone is blazing as of old,and say that they have caught its radiance, like a flash of summerlightning, far down the valley of the Saco. And be it owned that, manya mile from the Crystal Hills, I saw a wondrous light around theirsummits, and was lured, by the faith of poesy, to be the latest pilgrimof the GREAT CARBUNCLE.

  SKETCHES FROM MEMORY

  THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

  IT was now the middle of September. We had come since sunrise fromBartlett, passing up through the valley of the Saco, which extendsbetween mountainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often aslevel as a church aisle. All that day and two preceding ones we had beenloitering towards the heart of the White Mountains--those old crystalhills, whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our distantwanderings before we thought of visiting them. Height after height hadrisen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang belowthe peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, thoseavalanches of earth, stones and trees, which descend into the hollows,leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetationof ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and agroup of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the cloudsin its passage to the farther region.

  In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of thenorthern Indians coming down upon them from this mountain rampartthrough some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrouspath. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travellingup the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, tillat length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intendedroad. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it asundera thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hiddenminerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmostheart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. Thisis the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted todescribe it by so mean an image--feeling, as I do, that it is one ofthose symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though notto the conception, of Omnipotence.

  We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the appearanceof having been cut by human strength and artifice in the solid rock.There was a wall of granite on each side, high and precipitous,especially on our right, and so smooth that a few evergreens couldhardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is the entrance, or, inthe direction we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile ofthe Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling of wheels approachedbehind us, and a stage-coach rumbled out of the mountain, with seats ontop and trunks behind, and a smart driver, in a drab greatcoat, touchingthe wheel horses with the whipstock and reining in the leaders. To mymind there was a sort of poetry in such an incident, hardly inferiorto what would have accompanied the painted array of an Indian war partygliding forth from the same wild chasm. All the passengers, except avery fat lady on the back seat, had alighted. One was a mineralogist,a scientific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy hammer,with which he did great damage to the precipices, and put the fragmentsin his pocket. Another was a well-dressed young man, who carried anopera glass set in gold, and seemed to be making a quotation from someof Byron's rhapsodies on mountain scenery. There was also a trader,returning from Portland to the upper part of Vermont; and a fair younggirl, with a very faint bloom like one of those pale and delicateflowers which sometimes occur among alpine cliffs.

  They disappeared, and we followed them, passing through a deep pineforest, which for some miles allowed us to see nothing but its owndismal shade. Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out the sunshinelong before it left the external world. It was here that we obtained ourfirst view, except at a distance, of the principal group of mountains.They are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a proper mood,yet, by their breadth of base and the long ridges which support them,give the idea of immense bulk rather than of towering height. MountWashington, indeed, looked near to heaven: he was white with snow a miledownward, and had caught the only cloud that was sailing through theatmosphere to veil his head. Let us forget the other names of Americanstatesmen that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call theloftiest Washington. Mountains are Earth's undecaying monuments. Theymust stand while she endures, and never should be consecrated to themere great men of their own age and country, but to the mightyones alone, whose glory is universal, and whom all time will renderillustrious.

  The air, not often sultry in this elevated region, nearly two thousandfeet above the sea, was now sharp and cold, like that of a clearNovember evening in the lowlands. By morning, probably, there would be afrost, if not a snowfall, on the grass and rye, and an icy surface overthe standing water. I was glad to perceive a prospect of comfortablequarters in a house which we were approaching, and of pleasant companyin the guests who were assembled at the door.

  OUR EVENING PARTY AMONG THE MOUNTAINS We stood in front of a goodsubstantial farmhouse, of old date in that wild country. A sign over thedoor denoted it to be the White Mountain Post Office--an establishmentwhich distributes letters and newspapers to perhaps a score of persons,comprising the population of two or three townships among the hills. Thebroad and weighty antlers of a deer, 'a stag of ten,' were fastened atthe corner of the house; a fox's bushy tail was nailed beneath them; anda huge black paw lay on the ground, newly severed and still bleedingthe trophy of a bear hunt. Among several persons collected about thedoorsteps, the most rema
rkable was a sturdy mountaineer, of six feet twoand corresponding bulk, with a heavy set of features, such as might bemoulded on his own blacksmith's anvil, but yet indicative of mother witand rough humor. As we appeared, he uplifted a tin trumpet, four or fivefeet long, and blew a tremendous blast, either in honor of our arrivalor to awaken an echo from the opposite hill.

  Ethan Crawford's guests were of such a motley description as to formquite a picturesque group, seldom seen together except at some placelike this, at once the pleasure house of fashionable tourists and thehomely inn of country travellers. Among the company at the door werethe mineralogist and the owner of the gold opera glass whom we hadencountered in the Notch; two Georgian gentlemen, who had chilled theirsouthern blood that morning on the top of Mount Washington; a physicianand his wife from Conway; a trader of Burlington, and an old squire ofthe Green Mountains; and two young married