Good or bad, it seems to me to be much the best road anywhere in the region. The pitches and holes that would fain make coaching on the common roads so precarious are entirely left out here. The ascent is continuous. Not a step but leads upward. The rise was directed never to exceed one foot in six, and it does not; the average is one foot in eight. Of course, to accomplish this there must be a great deal of winding and turning. In one place you can look down upon what seem to he three roads running nearly parallel along a ridge, but what is really the one road twisting to its ascent. Some idea of the skill and science required to engineer it may be gathered by looking into the tangled wilderness and rocky roughness that lie still each side the way. Through such a gnarled, knotted, interlaced jungle of big trees and little trees, and all manner of tangled twining undergrowths, lining the sides of precipices, or hanging with bare roots over them, concealing dangers till the shuddering soul almost plunges into them, the road-men carefully and painfully sought and fought their way.
Up on rocky heights it was comparatively easy, for, as one very expressively phrased it, every stone which they pried up left a hole and made a hole. The stone wrenched from above rolled below, and go lowered the height and raised the depth, and constantly tended to levelness. Besides, there were no huge tree-trunks to be extracted from the unwilling jaws of the mountain by forest-dentists, with much sweat and toil and pain of dentist if not of jaws. Since, also, the rise of one foot in six was considered as great as was compatible with the well-being and well-doing of horses, whenever the way came upon a knob or a breastwork that refused to be brought down within the orthodox dimensions, it must turn. If the knob would not yield, the way must, and, in consequence, its lengthened bitterness is long drawn out. A line that continually doubles on itself is naturally longer than one which goes straight to the mark. Mount Washington is little more than a mile high;the road that creeps up its surly sides is eight miles long.
Frost and freshet are constant foes; the one heaves and cracks, and the other tears down through the cracks to undermine and destroy. Twenty-seven new culverts, we were told, had been made, within the space of a mile and a half, since last year;and these culverts are no child's play, but durable works,--aqueducts lined with stone and bridged with plank, large enough for a man to pass through with a wheelbarrow, and laid diagonally across the road, so that the torrents pouring down the gutter shall not have to turn a right angle, which they would gladly evade doing, but a very obtuse one, which they cannot in conscience refuse; and, as the road all the way is built a little higher on the precipice side than on the mountain side, the water naturally runs into the gutter on that side, and so is easily beguiled into leaving the road, which it would delight to destroy, and, roaring through the culvert, tumbles unwarily down the precipice before it knows what it is about.
I have heard it said, that the man who originated this road has since become insane. More likely he was insane at the time.
Surely, no man in his senses would ever have projected a scheme so wild and chimerical, so evidently impossible of fulfilment.
Projected it was, however, not only in fancy, but in fact, to our great content; and so, tamely but comfortably, an untiring cavalcade, we leave the peaceful glen set at the mountain's base, and wind through the lovely, lively woods, tremulous with sunshine and shadows, musical with the manifold songs of its pregnant solitudes, out from the woods, up from the woods, into the wild, cold, shrieking winds among the blenched rocks and the pale ghosts of dead forests stiff and stark, up and up among the caverns, and the gorges, and the dreadful chasms, piny ravines black and bottomless, steeps bare and rocky leading down to awful depths; on and on, fighting with maddened winds and the startled, wrathful wraiths, onward and upward till we stand on the bleak and shivering, the stony and soulless summit.
Desolation of desolations! Desolation of desolations! How terrible is this place! The shining mountain that flashed back to the sun his radiance is become a bald and frowning desert that appalls us with its barrenness. The sweet and sylvan approach gave no sign of such a goal, but the war between life and death was even then begun. The slant sunlight glinted through the jungle and bathed us with its glory of golden-green. The shining boles of the silvery gray birch shot up straight, and the white birch unrolled its patches of dead pallor in the sombre, untrodden depths. The spruces quivered like pure jellies tipped with light, sunshine prisoned in every green crystal. Myrtle-vines ran along the ground, the bunch-berry hung out its white banner, and you scarcely saw the trees that lay faint and fallen in the arms of their mates.
The damp, soft earth nourished its numerous brood, Terrae omni parentis alumnos, its own thirsty soul continually refreshed from springs whose sparkle we could not see, though the gurgle and ripple of their march sung out from so many hiding-places that we seemed to be "Seated in hearing of a hundred streams."Whole settlements of the slender, stately brakes filled the openings, and the mountain-ash drooped in graceful curves over our heads, but gradually the fine tall trees dwindled into dwarfs, chilled to the heart by the silent, pitiless cold.
