Mountains
Of The Pine-Cloaked, Snow-Capped Breed Are Unchristian Things.
Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and trust to modern science to
pull them through.
Not long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining
village as an angry elephant kneels; but it did not get up again, and
the half of that camp was no more seen on earth. The other half still
stands - uninhabited. The 'heathen in his blindness' would have made
arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he ever drove a pick
there. 'As a learned scholar of a little-known university once observed
to an engineer officer on the Himalaya-Tibet Road - 'You white men gain
nothing by not noticing what you cannot see. You fall off the road, or
the road falls on you, and you die, and you think it all an accident.
How much wiser it was when we were allowed to sacrifice a man
officially, sir, before making bridges or other public works. Then the
local gods were officially recognised, sir, and did not give any more
trouble, and the local workmen, sir, were much pleased with these
precautions.'
There are many local gods on the road through the Rockies: old bald
mountains that have parted with every shred of verdure and stand wrapped
in sheets of wrinkled silver rock, over which the sight travels slowly
as in delirium; mad, horned mountains, wreathed with dancing mists;
low-browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, sitting in
meditation beneath a burden of glacier-ice that thickens every year; and
mountains of fair aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with
hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is blackened with this
year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires.
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