"Have you seen God in His splendours? heard the text that Nature renders?"
Such fantasies of combination, too, as meet the eye: castles, towers, fortresses, that glow like opal and ruby and topaz; walls of sheer glaciers rising in dazzling whiteness like a spectral caravan; formless solitudes fit only for the abode of the gods! The spirit of the mountains is abroad on her revels; ice peaks 10,000 feet in the upper air are her toys; the winds are her Æolian harp; the Valley of a Thousand Falls is her theatre for pastime. Neither the Swiss { 173} Alps, nor yet that mysterious chain of the Tyrol, haunted by drifting cloudshapes and vocal with rushing waterfalls, can compare with the colossal scale of this splendour of all the Mount Robson region. It is the encountering of an entirely new range of experiences. It is Service again who interprets one's emotional enthusiasms in the stanzas:
"Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on? Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost? Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it; Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
"Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig a-quiver? (Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies), Have you broken trail on snow-shoes? mushed your huskies up the river, Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize?"
Strangest of all, in these stern mountain solitudes, with their glittering crevasses of ice, there are sheltered valleys all aglow with myriads of flowers in brilliant and gorgeous hues; and here, at sunset, peaks touched to gold and crimson are seen looming up in the transparent air against a background of intensely blue sky, a spectacle to inspire both painter and poet with its unearthly beauty.
To traverse such a region as this amid the luxury { 174} of the appointments of the Grand Trunk Pacific's transcontinental trains seems at first an anomaly; nothing is primitive save the forests primeval; nothing wild but the scenery. It is all a new universe, somewhere between the once familiar earth and the dream of Paradise--something by which to set the compass of life to a new polarity.