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.
