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Updated: May 15, 2025
While reading it one seems to feel the pure, keen, mountain air around one; to see the great peaks rising one above the other like the towers and spires of some vast cathedral of nature; to watch the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of gorgeous colour that rolls over the landscape from sunrise to sunset, and in the hush of the moonlit night disappears before the silver radiance of the nascent orb; to hear the fall of the mountain streams, and to catch the breath of the fragrant wind that comes from the pine-forest loaded with fragrance and freshness and subtle odours.
From my neck also it seemed that a heavy collar-weight fell loose and slipped itself as, having passed Nat's grave in the hollow, we left the pine-forest at our feet and wound our way up among the granite pinnacles, upward, still upward, into the clear air.
This place was shut up, for the undertaking has been abandoned; but in a rancho close by we found some Indian women and children, and there we took up our quarters. The rancho was a circular hut, built and thatched with reeds, though in the midst of a pine-forest; and presently a smart shower began, which came in upon us as though the roof had been a sieve.
How characteristic this superstition is of a nation of carriers of burdens! In the afternoon we started ourselves, our guide, and an Indian to carry cloaks, &c. up the mountain. We soon left the cultivated region, and entered upon the pine-forest, which we never left during our afternoon journey. One of the first showers of the rainy season came down upon us as we rode through the forest.
But for those two footsteps she would have sold us completely." We had just reached the edge of a pine-forest. In woods of this description the snow never reaches the ground except in the open spaces between the trees, the dense foliage intercepting it in its fall. This was a difficult part of our enterprise.
The storm had evidently come down here with terrific force, making a path through the pine-forest, some of whose trees were laid like wheat after a heavy wind; while just in front one huge tree had been blown right over, and in falling had crushed down a dozen or more in the path of its fall, letting in light, and strewing the soft earth with broken limbs, and trunks lying like jack-straws on the ground.
The long line of nearly dead level, with its stretches of thin pine-forest and its occasional glares of open sand, gives you an idea of nearly the whole country about Charleston, except that in general you ought to add to the picture a number of noble evergreen oaks bearded with pendent, weird Spanish moss, and occasional green spikes of the tropical-looking Spanish bayonet.
In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue. The army passed the main Alleghany, Meadow Mountain, and Great Savage Mountain, and traversed the funereal pine-forest afterwards called the Shades of Death.
The two sierras appear to converge at the eastern end of the valley. We are upon a transverse ridge that shuts it in upon the west, and from this point we view the picture. Where the valley ends eastwardly, we perceive a dark background lying up against the mountains. We know it is a pine-forest, but we are at too great a distance to distinguish the trees.
But the ascetic on the cross is a God for the sick and aged. What of us others? When shall the modern man, strong, scientifically schooled, find a temple for the sacred music, the anthem of eternity in his soul? The sun rose up from behind a distant hill-crest, scattering gold over the million spires of the pine-forest.
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