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. One felt the spirit
of the land change with the changing outline of the hills till, on the
lower levels by the Fraser, it seemed that even the Sussex Downs must be
nearer at heart to the Prairie than British Columbia.
