Page:To the Summit of Cardigan (1922).djvu/12

 For weeks the weather had been hazy, with a purple veil over all the hills. The Nomad had been quite content with that aspect of nature. The dog-day haze really magnifies and glorifies the mountains. By it their beautiful forms are emphasized; they are reduced to terms of line—their impression is simplified, and by that very means they answer the æsthetic craving more directly as well as more softly and gently. Looking at Cardigan across the crystal waters of Hart's Pond at Canaan Street, the Nomad did not care whether he ever climbed it or not. It completely answered the soul's demand with its lordly dome, its distinguished form, its unchallenged command of a lovely landscape. But one afternoon there came a mountain storm which shook the earth and drenched the face of nature; and next morning, when he arose, the air was as transparent as that strangely translucent atmosphere that one expects only in its perfection in the Rockies or the Sierras, and the thermometer on the porch indicated 50 degrees. Then everything in the world said, "Climb the mountain." And the Nomad went and climbed it—climbed it alone, for the sort of experience which lay before him was one that is lessened and qualified by the presence of others. When you meet God in the bush, or on the mountain top, you want no other company.

Along with the transparent air and the cool temperature there went a fierce wind from the northwest. The Nomad noted that well in setting forth. And he had a little misgiving when, in parting from Luisita, he accepted at her hands the responsibility of taking no personal risk on the mountain. It was a promise which, in fact, he had had to make. It was a condition of the solitary journey. But as he climbed the long and rather rough path up Cardigan, he forgot the promise. The wind had only the effect, then, to make Wagnerian music in the tops of the pines and beeches. It was a divine adjunct to the climb. On the way, leaving the last pile of sawdust where the mills, near the base, had been making lumber for the great war, he entered a region of unsurpassed forest beauty. There he passed through a veritable wilderness of fir balsams—the largest trees of this fine species, the greatest pure block of them, that he had ever seen.