A Book of the United States. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.

      White Mountains.

      These are the loftiest mountains in the United States, east of the Mississippi. They lie between the Connecticut and Androscoggin rivers on the north-east and west, and the head-waters of the Merrimack on the south sixty or seventy miles from the coast; yet their white summits are visible from many miles at sea. They extend about twenty miles from south-west to north-east, and their base is eight or ten miles broad.

      Mount Washington is the highest of all the White Mountains, being six thousand two hundred and thirty-four feet above the level of the sea. Next to Mount Washington in height is Mount Adams, then Jefferson, then Madison, all more than five thousand feet high; there are several besides these, though none so elevated. The country around and among the mountains is very wild and rough, and the mountains themselves are difficult of access. The east side of Mount Washington rises at an angle of forty-five degrees. The lower part of the mountain is covered with thick woods of spruce and fir trees, with deep beds of moss beneath. Heavy clouds of vapor often rest upon the mountain, and fill the moss with water, which cannot be exhaled or dried up by the sun on account of the woods, and therefore it breaks out in numerous springs which feed the streams from the mountain. The trees are short and stunted higher up the mountain; soon there are only bushes; then instead of bushes are vines; the last thing that grows is winter grass mixed with moss; the summit is entirely bare of vegetation. There is a plain from which the last height of Mount Washington rises to the height of fifteen hundred feet. This elevation or pinnacle is composed of huge grey rocks. Reaching the top much fatigued and out of breath, the traveller is instantly master of a boundless prospect, noble enough to pay him for his labor. The Atlantic dimly seen through a distance of sixty-five miles, the Vermont Mountains on the west, the southern and northern mountains of New Hampshire, Lake Winnipiseogee, ponds, streams, and towns, without number, all form a great impressive picture.

      The road from the seacoast to the mountains passes along the head stream of the Saco, which rises among these mountains, and breaks through them at a place known by the name of the Notch, a narrow defile extending two miles in length between two large cliffs, apparently rent asunder by some vast convulsion of nature.

      ‘The sublime and awful grandeur of this passage baffles all description. Geometry may settle the heights of the mountains; and numerical figures may record the measure; but no words can tell the emotions of the soul, as it looks upward, and views the almost perpendicular precipices which line the narrow space between them; while the senses ache with terror and astonishment, as one sees himself hedged in from all the world besides. He may cast his eye forward or backward, or to either side; he can see only upward, and there the diminutive circle of his vision is cribbed and confined by the battlements of nature’s ‘cloud-capped towers,’ which seem as if they wanted only the breathing of a zephyr, or the wafting of a straw against them, to displace them, and crush the prisoner in their fall. Just before our visit to this place, on the 26th of June, 1826, there was a tremendous avalanche, or slide, as it is there called, from the mountain which makes the southern wall of the passage. An immense mass of earth and rock, on the side of the mountain, was loosened from its resting place, and began to slide towards the bottom. In its course, it divided into three portions, each coming down, with amazing velocity, into the road, and sweeping before it shrubs, trees, and rocks, and filling up the road, beyond all possibility of its being removed. With great labor, a pathway has been made over these fallen masses, which admits the passage of a carriage. The place from which the slide, or slip, was loosened, is directly in the rear of a small, but comfortable dwelling-house, owned and occupied by a Mr. Willey, who has taken advantage of a narrow, a very narrow interval—where the bases of the two mountains seem to have parted and receded, as if afraid of coming into contact—to erect his lone habitation: and, were there not a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow, and had not the finger of that Providence traced the direction of the sliding mass, neither he, nor any soul of his family, would ever have told the tale. They heard the noise, when it first began to move, and ran to the door. In terror and amazement, they beheld the mountain in motion. But what can human power effect in such an emergency? Before they could think of retreating, or ascertain which way