The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

The Mad River drive is a delightful episode. In the way of mountain valley there is nothing like it. Bold crag, furious torrent, lonely cabin, blue peak, deep hollow, choked up with the densest foliage, constitute its varied and ever-changing features. The overhanging woods looked as if it had been raining sunshine; the road like an endless grotto of illuminated leaves, musical with birds, and exhaling a thousand perfumes.

The remainder of the route up the Pemigewasset is more and more a revelation of the august summits that have so constantly met us since entering this lovely valley. Boldly emerging from the mass of mountains, they present themselves at every mile in new combinations. Through Thornton and Woodstock the spectacle continues almost without intermission. Gradually, the finely-pointed peaks of the Lafayette group deploy and advance toward us. Now they pitch sharply down into the valley of the East Branch. Now the great shafts of stone are crusted with silvery light, or sprayed with the cataract. Now the sun gilds the slides that furrow, but do not deface them. Stay a moment at this rapid brook that comes hastening from the west! It is an envoy from yonder great, billowy mountain that lords it so proudly over

“many a nameless slide-scarred crest
And pine-dark gorge between.”

That is Moosehillock. Facing again the north, the road is soon swallowed up by the forest, and the forest by the mountains. A few poor cottages skirt the route. Still ascending, the miles grow longer and less interesting, until the white house, first seen from far below, suddenly stands uncovered at the left. We are at the Flume House, and before the gates of the Franconia Notch.

II.

THE FRANCONIA PASS

Beyond them, like a sun-rimmed cloud,
The great Notch Mountains shone,
Watched over by the solemn-browed
And awful face of stone! – Whittier.

WHEN Boswell exclaimed in ecstasy, “An immense mountain!” Dr. Johnson sneered, “An immense protuberance!” but he, the sublime cynic, became respectful before leaving the Hebrides. Charles Lamb, too, at one time pretended something approaching contempt for mountains; but, after a visit to Coleridge, he made the amende honorable in these terms:

“I feel I shall remember your mountains to the last day of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself; which he finds out when he leaves the lady.”

Notwithstanding their prepossessions against nature, and their undisguised preference for the smoke and dirt of London, the mountains awoke something in these two men which was apparently a revelation of themselves unto themselves. I have felt a higher respect for both since I knew that they loved mountains, as I pity those who have only seen heaven through the smoke of the city. It is not easy to explain two ideas so essentially opposite as are presented in the earlier and later declarations of these widely famous authors, unless we agree, keeping “Elia’s” odd simile in mind, that in the first case they should, like woman, be taken, not at what she says, but what she means.

The Flume House is the proper tarrying-place for an investigation of the mountain gorge from which it derives both its custom and its name. It is also placed opposite to the Pool, another of those natural wonders with which the pass is crowded, and which tempt us at every step to turn aside from the travelled road.

Fronting the hotel is a belt of woods, with two massive mountains rising behind. In the concealment of these woods the Pemigewasset, contracted to a modest stream, runs along the foot of the mountains. A rough, zigzag path leads through the woods to the river and to the Pool. Now raise the eyes to the summit-ridge of yonder mountain. The peak finely reproduces the features of a gigantic human face, while the undulations of the ridge fairly suggest a recumbent human figure wrapped in a shroud. The outlines of the forehead and nose are curiously like the profile of Washington; hence the colossal figure is called Washington Lying in State. This immortal sculpture gave rise to the idea that the tomb of Washington, like that of Desaix, on the St. Bernard, should be on the great summit that bears his name.

From the Flume House I looked up through the deep cleft of the Notch – an impressive vista. To the left is Cannon, or Profile Mountain; to the right the beetling crags of Eagle Cliff; then the pointed, shapely peaks of Lafayette; and so the range continues breaking off and off, bending away into lesser mountains that finally melt into pale-blue shadows. Now a stray cloud atop a peak gives it a volcanic character. Now a puff scatters it like thistle-down. It is a sultry summer’s morning, and banks of film hang like huge spider’s-webs in the tree-tops. Soon they detach themselves, and, floating lazily upward, are seized by a truant breeze, spun mischievously round, and then settle quietly down on the highest peaks like young eaglets on their nest.

Let us first walk down to the Pool. This Pool is a caprice of the river. Imagine a cistern, deeply sunk in granite, receiving at one end a weary cascade, which seems to crave a moment’s rest before hurrying on down the rocky pass. In the mystery and seclusion of ages, and with only the rude implements picked up by the way, the river has hollowed a basin a hundred feet wide and forty deep out of the stubborn rock. Without doubt Nature thus first taught us to cut the hardest marble with sand and water. Cliffs traversed by cracks rise a hundred feet higher. The water is a glossy and lustrous sea-green, and of such marvellous transparency that you see the brilliant pebbles sparkling at the bottom, shifting with the waves of light like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Overtopping trees lean timidly over and peer down into the Pool, which coldly repulses their shadows. Only the colorless hue of the rocks is reflected; and the stranger, seeing an old man with a gray beard standing erect in a boat, has no other idea than that he has arrived on the borders and is to be accosted by the ferryman of Hades.

The Flume is reached by going down the road a short distance, and then diverging to the left and crossing the river to the Flume Brook. A carriage-way conducts almost to the entrance of the gorge. Then begins an easy and interesting promenade up the bed of the brook.

This is a remarkable rock-gallery, driven several hundred feet into the heart of the mountain, through which an ice-cold brook rushes. The miracle of Moses seems repeated here sublimely. Some unknown power smote the rock, and the prisoned stream gushed forth free and lightsome as air. You approach it over broad ledges of freckled granite, polished by the constant flow of a thin, pellucid sheet of water to slippery smoothness. Proceeding a short distance up this natural esplanade, you enter a damp and gloomy fissure between perpendicular walls, rising seventy feet above the stream, and, on lifting your eyes suddenly, espy an enormous bowlder tightly wedged between the cliffs. Now try to imagine a force capable of grasping the solid rock and dividing it in halves as easily as you would an apple with your two hands.

At sight of the suspended bowlder, which seems, like Paul Pry, to have “just dropped in,” I believe every visitor has his moment of hesitation, which he usually ends by passing underneath, paying as he goes with a tremor of the nerves, more or less, for his temerity. But there is no danger. It is seen that the deep crevice, into which the rock seems jammed with the especial purpose of holding it asunder, also hugs the intruder like a vise; so closely, indeed, that, according to every appearance, it must stay where it is until doomsday, unless released by some passing earthquake from its imprisonment. Sentimental tourists do not omit to find a moral in this curiosity, which really looks to be on the eve of dropping, with a loud splash, into the torrent beneath. On top of the cliffs I picked up a visiting-card, on which some one with a poetic turn had written, “Does not this bowlder remind you of the sword of Damocles?” To a civil question, civil reply: No; to me it looks like a nut in a cracker.

Over the gorge bends an arcade of interlaced foliage shot through and through with sunshine; and wherever cleft or cranny can be found young birches, sword-ferns, trailing vines, insinuating their long roots in the damp mould, garland the cold granite with tenderest green. The exquisite white anemone blooms in the mossy wall wet with tiny streams that do not run but glide unperceived down. What could be more cunning than the persistency with which these hardy waifs, clinging or drooping along the craggy way, draw their sustenance from the rock, which seems to nourish them in spite of itself? Underneath your feet the swollen torrent storms along the gorge, dashing itself recklessly against intruding bowlders, or else passing them with a curl of disdain. How gallantly it surmounts every obstacle in its way! How crystal-clear are its waters! On it speeds, scattering pearls and diamonds right and left, like the prodigal it is; unpolluted, as yet, by the filth of cities, or turned into a languid, broken-spirited drudge by dams or mill-wheels. “Stop me?” it seems exclaiming. “Why, I am offspring of the clouds, their messenger to the parched earth, the mountain maid-of-all-work! Stay; step aside here in the sun and I will show you my rainbow-signet! When I rest, do you not behold the mother imaged in the features of the child? Stop me! Put your hand in my bosom and see how strong and full of life are my pulse-beats. To-morrow I shall be vapor. Thought is not freer. I do not belong to earth any more than the eagle sailing above yonder mountain-top.”

Overhead a fallen tree-trunk makes a crazy bridge from cliff to cliff. The sight of the gorge, with the flood foaming far below, the glitter of falling waters through the trees, the splendid light in the midst of deepest gloom, the solemn pines – the odorous forest, the wildness and the coolness – impart an indescribable charm to the spot that makes us reluctant to leave it. Many ladies ascend to the head of the gorge and, crossing on the rude bridge, leave their visiting-cards on the other side; one had left her pocket-handkerchief, with the scent fresh upon it. I picked it up, and out hopped a toad.

After the Pool and the Flume, an ascent of the mountain behind the hotel will be found conducive to enjoyment of another kind. This mountain commands delicious views of the valley of the Pemigewasset. A short hour is usually sufficient for the climb. It was a very raw, windy morning on which I climbed it, but the uncommon purity of the air and the exceeding beauty of the landscape were most rarely combined with cloud effects seen only in conjunction with a brisk north-west wind. I had taken a station similar to that occupied by Mount Willard with respect to the Saco Valley, now opening a vista essentially different from that most memorable one in my mountain experience. The valley is not the same. You see the undulating course of the river for many leagues, and but for an intercepting hill, which hides them, might distinguish the houses of Plymouth. The vales of Woodstock, Thornton, and Campton, spotted with white houses, lie outspread in the sun, between enclosing mountains; and the windings of the Pemigewasset are now seen dark and glossy, now white with foam, appearing, disappearing, and finally lost to view in the blended distance. The sky was packed with clouds. Over the vivid green of the intervales their black shadows drifted swiftly and noiselessly, first turning the light on, then off again, with magical effect. To look up and see these clouds all in motion, and then, looking down, see those weird draperies darkly trailing over the land, was a reminiscence of

“The dim and shadowy armies of our unquiet dreams —
Their footsteps brush the dewy fern and paint the shaded streams.”

The mountain ridges flowed southward with marvellous smoothness to the vanishing-point, on one side of the valley bright green, on the other indigo blue. This picture was not startling, like that from the Crawford Notch, but, in its own way, was incomparable. The sunsets are said to be beautiful beyond description.

One looks up the Notch upon the great central peaks composing the water-shed – Cannon, Lafayette, Lincoln, and the rest – to see crags, ridges, black forests, rising before him in all their gloomy magnificence.

On one side all is beauty, harmony, and grace; on the other, a packed mass of bristling, steep-sided mountains seem storming the sky with their gray turrets. Could we but look over the brawny shoulders of the mountains opposite to us, the eye would take in the vast, untrodden solitudes of the Pemigewasset forests cut by the East Branch and presided over by Mount Carrigain – a region as yet reserved for those restless and adventurous spirits whom the beaten paths of travel have ceased to charm or attract. But an excursion into this “forest primeval” is to be no holiday promenade. It is an arduous and difficult march over slippery rocks, through tangled thickets, or up the beds of mountain torrents. Hard fare and a harder bed of boughs finish the day, every hour of which has been a continued combat with fresh obstacles. At this price one may venture to encounter the virgin wilderness or, as the cant phrase is, “try roughing it.” It is a curious feeling to turn your back upon the last cart-path, then upon the last foot-path; to hear the distant baying of a hound grow fainter and fainter – in a word, to exchange at a single step the sights and sounds of civilized life, the movement, the bustle, for a silence broken only by the hum of bees and the murmur of invisible waters.

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.