Page:To the Summit of Cardigan (1922).djvu/13

 Across the trail up Cardigan, which is clear enough up to the timber line, the storm had thrown sundry tree trunks, which enforced many clambering detours, but these were not especially difficult. The path was lined with hobblebush (the Viburnum lantanoides), with ferns of every sort, with the pretty overhanging sprays of striped maple, with the trillium in fruit, and many other beautiful things. Most of the way the path followed the noisy brooks upward, and some of the way the brooks followed the path downward. But it was a road of enchantment, and every moment was an exaltation.

At last the trail came squarely out of the timber, which had now shrunk to a growth of stunted spruce, and was at a visible end. Smooth granite rocks lay before the climber—undulating rocks, as it were, but quite smooth. This was the granite dome of Cardigan. Above loomed this greater dome, and at the top of all a little lesser dome, the summit of which was not a hundred yards away. The goal of the journey was at hand.

The ascent had been up the western side of the mountain, and now, with the climber's entrance upon the open space at the summit, the westward and southward panorama was in full view. And what a view! In the foreground the townships of Orange, Canaan, Enfield, Hanover and all their lakes—Hart's pond, here called "Crystal Lake," though there is another Crystal Lake plainly visible farther south; Mascoma, and other little shining bodies of water; villages here and there; immediately to the westward. Moose mountain in Hanover, and past its slope, far but vividly clear, the Killington range in Vermont, with Killington peak and Pico sharply defined, picturesque; farther south, Ascutney's beautiful pyramid, standing solitary past the Connecticut; southward the southern Kearsarge, and farther, blue and magnificent, the divine shape of Monadnock. And is that point in the distance our own Wachusett? Manifestly it is.