Page:Letters from America, Brooke, 1916.djvu/167

Rh again to a windy space. Once or twice the ground fell away, and there was, for a moment, the mysterious gleam and stir of water. Canadian stars are remote and virginal. Everyone slumbered. Arrival at the great concrete building and the little shacks of the power-station shook us to our feet. The Italian vanished into the darkness. Whether he found his sons or fell into the river no one knew, and no one seemed to care.

An Indian, taciturn and Mongolian, led us on next day, by boat and on foot, to the lonely log-house we aimed at. It stood on high rocks, above a lake six miles by two. There was an Indian somewhere, by a river three miles west, and a trapper to the east, and a family encamped on an island in the lake. Else nobody.

It is that feeling of fresh loneliness that impresses itself before any detail of the wild. The soul—or the personality—seems to have indefinite room to expand. There is no one else within reach, there never has been anyone; no one else is thinking of the lakes and hills you see before you. They have no tradition, no names even; they are only pools of water and lumps of earth, some day, perhaps to be clothed with loves and memories