Hour in the dusk just before we left, when the
company gathered to say good-bye, while young couples walked in the
street, and the glare of the never-extinguished natural-gas lamps
coloured the leaves of the trees a stage green.
It was a woman, speaking out of the shadow, who said, what we all felt,
'You see, we just love our town,'
'So do we,' I said, and it slid behind us.
MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC
The Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the cattle-ranches, mills,
breweries, and three million acre irrigation works. The river that
floats timber to the town from the mountains does not slide nor rustle
like Prairie rivers, but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a
greenish tinge in its water hints of the snows.
What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively half-hour (motors were
invented to run about new cities). What I heard I picked up, oddly
enough, weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea. He was
qualmish, but his Saga of triumph upheld him.
'Three years ago I come to Canada by steerage - third class. And I have
the language to learn. Look at me! I have now my own dairy business, in
Calgary, and - look at me! - my own half section, that is, three hundred
and twenty acres. All my land which is mine! And now I come home, first
class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me,
some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands
near by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a
man which works.'
'And will your friends go?' I inquired.
'You bet they will. It is all arranged already. I bet they get ready to
go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas
here in Denmark, first class like me.'
'Then you think Calgary is going ahead?'
'You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. Look at me! Chickens?
I raise chickens also in Calgary,' etc., etc.
After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest
to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been
in-spanned for the work of civilisation. The timber off their sides was
ducking and pitch-poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into
house-stuff for all the world. The woodwork of a purely English villa
may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner's income.
The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding
gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the
true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas. 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. The drip from it seeps away
through slopes of unstable gravel and dirt, till, at the appointed
season, the whole half-mile of undermined talus slips and roars into the
horrified valley.
The railway winds in and out among them with little inexplicable
deviations and side-twists, much as a buck walks through a forest-glade,
sidling and crossing uneasily in what appears to be a plain way. Only
when the track has rounded another shoulder or two, a backward and
upward glance at some menacing slope shows why the train did not take
the easier-looking road on the other side of the gorge.
From time to time the mountains lean apart, and nurse between them some
golden valley of slow streams, fat pastures, and park-like uplands, with
a little town, and cow bells tinkling among berry bushes; and children
who have never seen the sun rise or set, shouting at the trains; and
real gardens round the houses.
At Calgary it was a frost, and the dahlias were dead. A day later
nasturtiums bloomed untouched beside the station platforms, and the air
was heavy and liquid with the breath of the Pacific.
