Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man and his works.
On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a disconcerting bump. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing--only that particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.
When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees--the depth one is going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places. And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the bridge could hold it.
He said he thought so, but it had never been tested by such a weight before.
From the way he said "thought," we gathered he meant "hoped."
Somebody had wanted to show the Prince the view. It was a fine view, but we were not sorry it wasn't permanent. With the view, the Prince took in a little shooting at clay pigeons in view of the days he was to spend in sporting Nipigon.
We ran straight on to Nipigon, only stopping at Oba, and that in the night. But before the night came Canada and Algoma gave us an exquisite sunset. We saw the light of the sun on a vast stretch of hummocks and hills of bald rock. They had been clothed with forest before the fires had passed over them. As the sun set, an exquisite thin cherry light shone evenly on the hills and bluffs, and on the thin and naked trees that stood up like wands in this eerie and clarified light. In the distance there was a faint vermilion in the sky, and where the tree stumps fringed the bare hills, they gave the suggestion of a band of violet edging the land. And all this in an air as clear and shining as still water. It seemed to me that Canada was waiting there for a painter of a new vision to catch its wonder.