Perhaps the magic may lie in the scent of strange evergreens and
mosses not known outside the ranges: or it may strike from wall to wall
of timeless rifts and gorges, but it seemed to me to draw out of the
great sea that washes further Asia - the Asia of allied mountains, mines,
and forests.
We rested one day high up in the Rockies, to visit a lake carved out of
pure jade, whose property is to colour every reflection on its bosom to
its own tint. A belt of brown dead timber on a gravel scar, showed,
upside down, like sombre cypresses rising from green turf and the
reflected snows were pale green. In summer many tourists go there, but
we saw nothing except the wonderworking lake lying mute in its circle of
forest, where red and orange lichens grew among grey and blue moss, and
we heard nothing except the noise of its outfall hurrying through a jam
of bone-white logs. The thing might have belonged to Tibet or some
unexplored valley behind Kin-chinjunga. It had no concern with the West.
As we drove along the narrow hill-road a piebald pack-pony with a
china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, black-haired,
bare-headed, wearing beadwork squaw-jackets, and riding straddle. A
string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines behind them.
'Indians on the move?' said I. 'How characteristic!'
As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes, and
they were, past any doubt, the comprehending equal eyes of the civilised
white woman which moved in that berry-brown face.
'Yes,' said our driver, when the cavalcade had navigated the next
curve,' that'll be Mrs. So-and-So and Miss So-and-So. They mostly camp
hereabout for three months every year. I reckon they're coming in to the
railroad before the snow falls.'
'And whereabout do they go?' I asked.
'Oh, all about anywheres. If you mean where they come from just
now - that's the trail yonder.'
He pointed to a hair-crack across the face of a mountain, and I took
his word for it that it was a safe pony-trail. The same evening, at an
hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock
was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly-arranged
hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket who had quirted
the piebald pack-pony past our buggy.
Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures! But do you know any
other country where two women could go out for a three months' trek and
shoot in perfect comfort and safety?
These mountains are only ten days from London, and people more and more
use them for pleasure-grounds. Other and most unthought-of persons buy
little fruit-farms in British Columbia as an excuse for a yearly visit
to the beautiful land, and they tempt yet more people from England. This
is apart from the regular tide of emigration, and serves to make the
land known. If you asked a State-owned railway to gamble on the chance
of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you
that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk
the taxpayers' money in erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa
could, even now, be made a tourists' place - if only the railroads and
steamship lines had faith.
On thinking things over I suspect I was not intended to appreciate the
merits of British Columbia too highly. Maybe I misjudged; maybe she was
purposely misrepresented; but I seemed to hear more about 'problems'
and 'crises' and 'situations' in her borders than anywhere else. So far
as eye or ear could gather, the one urgent problem was to find enough
men and women to do the work in hand.
Lumber, coal, minerals, fisheries, fit soil for fruit, dairy, and
poultry farms are all there in a superb climate. The natural beauty of
earth and sky match these lavish gifts; to which are added thousands of
miles of safe and sheltered waterways for coastal trade; deep harbours
that need no dredge; the ground-works of immense and ice-free ports - all
the title-deeds to half the trade of Asia. For the people's pleasure and
good disport salmon, trout, quail, and pheasant play in front of and
through the suburbs of her capitals. A little axe-work and
road-metalling gives a city one of the loveliest water-girt parks that
we have outside the tropics. Another town is presented with a hundred
islands, knolls, wooded coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid
down as expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, beneath
skies never too hot and rarely too cold. If they care to lift up their
eyes from their almost subtropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks
across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a
sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect
or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain,
pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning of want
and fear.
Such a land is good for an energetic man. It is also not so bad for the
loafer. I was, as I have told you, instructed on its, drawbacks. I was
to understand that there was no certainty in any employment; and that a
man who earned immense wages for six months of the year would have to be
kept by the community if he fell out of work for the other six.
