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Show 318 THE CALIFORNIA AND OREGON TRAIL. savages; but if the reader has ever wandered, with a true hunter's spirit, among the forests of Maine, or the more pictur. esque solitudes of the Adirondack Mountains, he will under. stand how the sombre woods and mountains around me might have awakened any other feelings than those of gloom. In truth, they recalled gladdening recollections of similar scenes in a distant and far different land. After we had been advancing for several hours, through passages always narrow, often obstructed and difficult, I saw at a little distance on our right a narrow opening between two high, wooded precipices. All within seemed darkness and mystery. In the mood in which I found myself, something strongly impelled me to enter. Passing over the intervening space, I guided my horse through the rocky portal, and as I did so, instinctively drew the covering from my rifle, half expecting that some unknown evil lay in ambush within those dreary recesses. The place was shut in among tall cliffs, and so deeply shadowed by a host of old pine-trees, that though the sun shone bright on the side of the mountain, nothing but a dim twilight could penetrate within. As far as I could see, it had ,.. no tenants except a few hawks and owls, who, dismayed at my intrusion, flapped hoarsely away among the shaggy branches. I moved forward, determined to explore the mystery to the bottom, and soon became involved among the pines. The genius of the place exercised a strange influence upon my mind. Its faculties were stimulated into extraordinary activity, and as I passed along, many half-forgotten incidents, and · the images of persons and things far distant, rose rapidly before me, with surprising distinctness. In that perilous wilderness, eight hundred miles removed beyond the faintest vestige of PASSAGE! OF THE MOUNTAINS. 319 civilizati·O n, th e scenes of another hemisphere, the seat of ancw· n t 1·efinement passed bef•o re me, more like a succession of vivid paintings than any mere dreams of the fancy. I saw the church of St. Peter's illumined on the evening of Easter-Day, the whole majestic pile fmm the cross to the foundation-stone, . pencilled in fire, and shedding a radiance, like the serene light of the moon, on the sea of upturned faces below. I saw the peak of Mount Etna towering above its inky mantle of clouds, and lightly curling its wreaths of milk-white smoke against the soft sky, flushed with the Sicilian sunset. I saw also the gloomy vaulted pu.ssages and the narrow cells of the Passionist convent, where I once had sojourned for a few days with the fanatical monks, its pale stern inmates, in their robes of black ; and the oa rated window from whence I could look out, a for-bidden indulgence, upon the melancholy Coliseum and the crumbling ruins of the Eternal City. The mighty glaciers of the Splugen too, rose before me, gleaming in the sun like polished silver, and those terrible solitudes, the birth-place of the Rhine, where bursting from the bowels of its native mountain it lashes and foams down the rocky abyss into the little valley of Andeer. These recollections, and many more crowded upon me, until remembering that it was hardly wise to remain long in such a place, I mounted again and retraced my steps. Issuing from between the rocks, I saw, a few rods before me, the men, women and children, dogs and horses, still filing slowly across the little glen. A bare round hill rose directly above them. I rode to the top, and from this point I could look down on the savage processi~n as it passed just beneath my feet, and far on the left I could see its thin and broken line, visible only at intervals, stretching away for miles among the mountains. On • |
