Mount Rainier, a Record of Exploration. Various

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to see if I had achieved mastery as well as position—as I looked somewhat wearily and drearily across the solemn surges of forest, suddenly above their sombre green appeared Tacoma. Large and neighbor it stood, so near that every jewel of its snow-fields seemed to send me a separate ray; yet not so near but that I could with one look take in its whole image, from clear-cut edge to edge.

      All around it the dark evergreens rose like a ruff; above them the mountain splendors swelled statelier for the contrast. Sunlight of noon was so refulgent upon the crown, and lay so thick and dazzling in nooks and chasms, that the eye sought repose of gentler lights, and found it in shadowed nooks and clefts, where, sunlight entering not, delicate mist, an emanation from the blue sky, had fallen, and lay sheltered and tremulous, a mild substitute for the stronger glory. The blue haze so wavered and trembled into sunlight, and sunbeams shot glimmering over snowy brinks so like a constant avalanche, that I might doubt whether this movement and waver and glimmer, this blending of mist with noontide flame, were not a drifting smoke and cloud of yellow sulphurous vapor floating over some slowly chilling crater far down in the red crevices.

      But if the giant fires had ever burned under that cold summit, they had long since gone out. The dome that swelled up passionately had crusted over and then fallen in upon itself, not vigorous enough with internal life to bear up in smooth proportion. Where it broke into ruin was no doubt a desolate waste, stern, craggy, and riven, but such drear results of Titanic convulsion the gentle snows hid from view.

      No foot of man had ever trampled those pure snows. It was a virginal mountain, distant from the possibility of human approach and human inquisitiveness as a marble goddess is from human love.

      Yet there was nothing unsympathetic in its isolation, or despotic in its distant majesty. But this serene loftiness was no home for any deity of those that men create. Only the thought of eternal peace arose from this heaven-upbearing monument like incense, and, overflowing, filled the world with deep and holy calm.

      Wherever the mountain turned its cheek toward the sun, many fair and smiling dimples appeared, and along soft curves of snow, lines of shadow drew tracery fair as the blue veins on a child's temple. Without the infinite sweetness and charm of this kindly changefulness of form and color, there might have been oppressive awe in the presence of this transcendent glory against the solemn blue of noon. Grace played over the surface of majesty, as a drift of rose-leaves wavers in the air before a summer shower, or as a wreath of rosy mist flits before the grandeur of a storm. Loveliness was sprinkled like a boon of blossoms upon sublimity.

      Our lives forever demand and need visual images that can be symbols to us of the grandeur or the sweetness of repose. There are some faces that arise dreamy in our memories, and look us into calmness in our frantic moods. Fair and happy is a life that need not call upon its vague memorial dreams for such attuning influence, but can turn to a present reality, and ask tranquillity at the shrine of a household goddess. The noble works of nature, and mountains most of all,

      "have power to make

       Our noisy years seem moments in the being

       Of the eternal silence."

      And, studying the light and the majesty of Tacoma, there passed from it and entered into my being, to dwell there evermore by the side of many such, a thought and an image of solemn beauty, which I could thenceforth evoke whenever in the world I must have peace or die. For such emotion years of pilgrimage were worthily spent. If mortal can gain the thoughts of immortality, is not his earthly destiny achieved? For, when we have so studied the visible poem, and so fixed it deep in the very substance of our minds, there is forever with us not merely a perpetual possession of delight, but a watchful monitor that will not let our thoughts be long unfit for the pure companionship of beauty. For whenever a man is false to the light that is in him, and accepts meaner joys, or chooses the easy indulgence that meaner passions give, then every fair landscape in all his horizon dims, and all its grandeurs fade and dwindle away, the glory vanishes, and he looks, like one lost, upon his world, late so lovely and sinless.

      While I was studying Tacoma, and learning its fine lesson, it in turn might contemplate its own image far away on the waters of Whulge, where streams from its own snows, gushing seaward to buffet in the boundless deep, might rejoice in a last look at their parent ere they swept out of Puyallop Bay. Other large privilege of view it had. It could see what I could not—Tacoma the Less, Mt. Adams, meritorious but clumsy; it could reflect sunbeams gracefully across a breadth of forest to St. Helen's, the vestal virgin, who still kept her flame kindled, and proved her watchfulness ever and anon. Continuing its panoramic studies, Tacoma could trace the chasm of the Columbia by silver circles here and there—could see every peak, chimney, or unopened vent, from Kulshan to Shasta Butte. The Blue Mountains eastward were within its scope, and westward the faint-blue levels of the Pacific. Another region, worthy of any mountain's beholding, Tacoma sees, somewhat vague and dim in distance: it sees the sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and grove. In no older world where men have, in all their happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the possible education of refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.

      All this Tacoma beholds, as I can but briefly hint; and as one who is a seer himself becomes a tower of light and illumination to the world, so Tacoma, so every brother seer of his among the lofty snow-peaks, stands to educate, by his inevitable presence, every dweller thereabouts. Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss—where every breath is a draught of vivid life—these Oregon people, carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others; carrying the civilization of history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe—with such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.

      Up to Tacoma, or into some such solitude of nature, imaginative men must go, as Moses went up to Sinai, that the divine afflatus may stir within them. The siwashes appreciate, according to their capacity, the inspiration of lonely grandeur, and go upon the mountains, starving and alone, that they may become seers, enchanters, magicians, diviners—what in conventional lingo is called "big medicine." For though the Indians here have not peopled these thrones of their world with the creatures of an anthropomorphic mythology, they yet deem them the abode of Tamanoüs. Tamanoüs is a vague and half-personified type of the unknown, of the mysterious forces of nature; and there is also an indefinite multitude of undefined emanations, each one a tamanoüs with a small t, which are busy and impish in complicating existence, or equally active and spritely in unravelling it. Each Indian of this region patronizes his own personal tamanoüs, as men of the more eastern tribes keep a private manitto, and as Socrates kept a daimôn. To supply this want, Tamanoüs with a big T undergoes an avatar, and incarnates himself into a salmon, a beaver, a clam, or into some inanimate object, such as a canoe, a paddle, a fir-tree, a flint, or into some elemental essence, as fire, water, sun, mist; and tamanoüs thus individualized becomes the "guide, philosopher, and friend" of every siwash, conscious that otherwise he might stray and be lost in the unknown realms of Tamanoüs.

      Hamitchou, a frowzy ancient of the Squallyamish, told to Dr. Tolmie and me, at Nisqually, a legend of Tamanoüs and Tacoma, which, being interpreted, runs as follows:—

      Hamitchou's Legend

      "Avarice, СКАЧАТЬ