The Crest of the Continent: A Summer's Ramble in the Rocky Mountains and Beyond. Ernest IngersollЧитать онлайн книгу.
and giddy snow-banks on impossible summits—seized and held us, until a shivering voice gave the alarm: ‘It is all red in the east.’
“We had climbed all those miles purposely to see the spectacle of dawn, but there was unhappiness among the pinched and pallid enthusiasts who crept out on the rocks and watched the half-light on the plains deepen. A pale and withered moon hung overhead, and miles away on the plain lay a vast white cloud like a lake, until the rising sun touched it and sent it rolling and tossing like angry waves. A crimson ball sprang suddenly from the outermost rim of the earth, glared with a red and sleepy eye upon the world, and pulled the cover of a cloud above it for a second nap before it came forth in full splendor. The shadow of the Peak projected westward fell this time on the uneven mountains, whose sides and clefts were filled and floating with faint pearl, lilac and roseate mists. The black patch where Denver lay on the plains, the snowy top of Gray’s Peak, the green basin of South Park, and seemingly everything from end to end of the State, could be seen. Shivering, freezing, on that mountain top, with a fur cloak about me, besides all the other wraps, it seemed that there never was a winter day half as cold.
“In all the crevices of the rocks, wherever there was enough powdered granite to form a soil for their roots, were tiny little white blossoms, fairy stars or flowers, with just their heads above the ground, and an exquisite perfume breathing from them. Bidding the guide to sinch up quickly for the down trip, we partook of the signal sergeant’s coffee, and listened to his anecdotes of his lonesome life of two weeks on the mountain and two weeks in town.
“ ‘You are the best crowd that’s been up,’ said the brave man of barometers. ‘They all get sick when they stay over night. It took me a month to get used to it. You ought to stay until noon and see the tender-feet come up and get sick. Oh, Lord! there was an old lady up here the other day, and she says to me: “Sergeant, don’t people ever die of this sickness up here?” “Oh, yes, ma’am,” says I, “a lady died the other day, and as there wasn’t any one to identify her we just put her over in that snow-bank there.” ’
PIKE’S PEAK TRAIL.
“With a lot more of such mountain horrors he kept his rafters ringing, and then bade us climb the ladder to the top of his house, which would make up the difference of fifteen feet between his abode and Gray’s Peak. We looked at the grave of the imaginary child destroyed by mountain rats, gave a last glance at the enchanted view, and left the chilling region.”
Another entertaining jaunt is a couple of miles or less up the Ute Pass wagon-road to Rainbow Falls, one of the finest cascades in the West—where such things are more of a curiosity than in wetter regions of the world. The water comes down here with a more than ordinarily desperate plunge, and it is great sport to climb about the angular rocks that hem it in.
Ute Pass leads over into South Park, and before the days of railways it was greatly traveled by passengers and by freight wagons to Leadville and Fairplay. There is less transit there now, but in summer pleasure-parties constantly traverse the Pass, partly for its own sake and partly to enjoy a sight of Manitou Park on the opposite side, whence a magnificent array of the snowy interior ranges is to be seen, northward and westward, while Pike’s Peak presents itself to superior advantage from that point of view. In the park is a good little hotel and dairy, and a trout stream and pond where the Eastern brook-trout has been assiduously cultivated. In the fall Manitou Park is the resort of deer hunters and grouse shooters.
Then there is the already mentioned Garden of the Gods, hidden behind those garish walls of red and yellow sandstone, so stark and out of place in the soberly-toned landscape that they travesty nature, converting the whole picture into a theatrical scene, and a highly spectacular one at that. Passing behind these sensational walls, one is not surprised to find a sort of gigantic peep-show in pantomime. The solid rocks have gone masquerading in every sort of absurd costume and character. The colors of the make-up, too, are varied from black through all the browns and drabs to pure white, and then again through yellows and buffs and pinks up to staring red. Who can portray adequately these odd forms of chiseled stone? I have read a dozen descriptions, and so have you, no doubt. But one I have just seen, in a letter by a Boston lady, is so pertinent you should have the pleasure of reading it:
“The impression is of something mighty, unreal and supernatural. Of the gods surely—but the gods of the Norse Walhalla in some of their strange outbursts of wild rage or uncouth playfulness. The beauty-loving divinities of Greece and Rome could have nothing in common with such sublime awkwardness. Jove’s ambrosial curls must shake in another Olympia than this. Weird and grotesque, but solemn and awful at the same time, as if one stood on the confines of another world, and soon the veil would be rent which divided them. Words are worse than useless to attempt such a picture. Perhaps if one could live in the shadow of its savage grandeur for months until his soul were permeated, language would begin to find itself flowing in proper channels, but in the first stupor of astonishment one must only hold his breath. The Garden itself, the holy of holies, as most fancy, is not so overpowering to me as the vast outlying wildness.
“To pass in between massive portals of rock of brilliant terra-cotta red, and enter on a plain miles in extent, covered in all directions with magnificent isolated masses of the same striking color, each lifting itself against the wonderful blue of a Colorado sky with a sharpness of outline that would shame the fine cutting of an etching; to find the ground under your feet, over the whole immense surface, carpeted with the same rich tint, underlying arabesques of green and gray, where grass and mosses have crept; to come-upon masses of pale velvety gypsum, set now and again as if to make more effective by contrast the deep red which strikes the dominant chord of the picture; and always, as you look through or above, to catch the stormy billows of the giant mountain range tossed against the sky, with the regal snow-crowned massiveness of Pike’s Peak rising over all, is something, once seen, never to be forgotten. Strange, grotesque shapes, mammoth caricatures of animals, clamber, crouch, or spring from vantage points hundreds of feet in air. Here a battlemented wall is pierced by a round window; there a cluster of slender spires lift themselves; beyond, a leaning tower slants through the blue air, or a cube as large as a dwelling-house is balanced on a pivot-like point at the base, as if a child’s strength could upset it. Imagine all this scintillant with color, set under a dazzling sapphire dome, with the silver stems and delicate frondage of young cottonwoods in one space, or a strong young hemlock lifting green symmetrical arms from some high rocky cleft in another. This can be told, but the massiveness of sky-piled masonry, the almost infernal mixture of grandeur and grotesqueness, are beyond expression. After the first few moments of wild exclamation one sinks into an awed silence.”
The reader must see for himself these grotesque monuments, these relics of ruined strata, these sportive, wind-cut ghosts of the old regime here, these fanciful images of things seen and unseen, which stand thickly over hundreds of acres like the moldering ruins of some half-buried city of the desert, if he would fully understand.
Out of the many other sources of enjoyment near Manitou, the visitor will by no means neglect the Cave of the Winds. Though you may ride, if you wish, it is just a pleasant walk up Williams’ Cañon, one of the prettiest of the gorges that seam the rugged base of the great Peak. The walls are limestone, stained bright red and Indian yellow, lofty, vertical, and broken into a multitude of bastions, turrets, pinnacles and sweeping, hugely carved façades, whose rugged battlements tower hundreds of feet overhead against a sky of violet. At their bases these upright walls are so close together that much of the way there is not room for one carriage to pass another, and the track lies nearly always in the very bed of the sparkling brook. You seem always in a cul de sac among the zigzags of this irregular chasm, and sometimes the abundant foliage, rooted in the crevices above, meets in an arch across the brightly-painted but narrow space you are tortuously threading.
Half a mile up the cañon, at the end of the roadway, a trail goes by frequent turnings up the precipitous sides of the ravine to where a sheer cliff begins, about three hundred feet higher. Floundering up this steep and slippery goat-path, we arrived breathless at a stairway leading through an arch of native rock into a great chimney, opening out to the sunlight