Читать книгу Fruit Ranching in British Columbia - John Thomas Bealby - Страница 5
ОглавлениеWinnipeg to Nelson.
The last night of our journey before we reached Nelson was spent in the Crows' Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains. The finest part of the pass was unfortunately traversed in the middle of the night while we were all asleep. And even if we had not been asleep, the pass is, I am told, so narrow that you can see but little of its grandeur from the window of a passenger car. The scenery is remarkably fine, and the route presents several engineering feats worthy of attention. At one place the railway line describes a complete loop, the upper end of which lies almost vertically above the lower end. The finest scenery in this part of the Rocky Mountains—scenery that is truly entitled to be described as magnificent—occurs in the Kicking Horse Pass, by which the main line of the C.P.R. pierces the range on its way from Winnipeg to Vancouver.
The name of the Crows' Nest Pass is in no way connected with the familiar bird. The Crows are, or were, Indians, and the word "nest" is a rough translation of an Indian word for "encampment." This particular "nest" of the Crow Indians is one of ensanguined omen in the annals of Redskin warfare. It was here that a large band of Crow Indians were surprised and massacred by a larger force of their hereditary enemies, the Blackfeet.
But though we did not obtain good views of the Rocky Mountains proper, we did see something of the Purcell and Selkirk Ranges, two of the flanking ranges on the west side of the Rockies. At that time, the end of March, the mountains were still draped in snow, or, more strictly speaking, in snow and ice, for the summits of both these ranges are, as a rule, sharp cut and rugged, even in places serrated—or notched like a saw. Glaciers form on them, and remain permanently, although as a rule the loftier summits during the summer shake off their snowy hoods and bare their brows to the sparkling airs of British Columbia.
These mountains we saw from Lake Kootenay, which they fence in on east and west. It was on this lake that we travelled the last fifty or sixty miles of our journey before reaching Nelson. It is a long, narrow sheet of water, stretching north and south for eighty miles by some three to five miles wide, and is set deep in a framework of rocky mountains. I could readily have fancied myself transported again to one of the Norwegians fjords. There is in the two regions the same aspect of sternness and adamantine immovability, the same comparative absence of the subduing hand of man, the same sombre draping of dark pine woods, the same sullen sleep of the unfathomable waters at their feet. The general impression, not exactly one of magnificence, owing to the absence of towering altitude in the mountain peaks, is yet that of sublimity, of grandeur, of power. The mountain girdle is massive, its continuity unbroken; its features are devoid of softness, of allurement, of winning charm. I do not mean that these Kootenay Mountains and this Kootenay Lake lack attraction. I mean that it is to severe and austere moods of the imagination that they appeal, rather than to soft and tender sensibilities. The poetic effect is produced; but it is an effect that is sympathetic to the mind of a Crabbe rather than to the mind of a Longfellow, typical of a Browning rather than of a Tennyson.
The boat by which we travelled from Kootenay Landing, at the south end of Kootenay Lake, to Nelson, near the western extremity of the west arm of the same lake, was a stern-wheeler, shaped like the boats which ply up and down the Mississippi. The "boat" proper is flat-bottomed and very shallow. Above it are constructed three or four oblong, round-ended stories, to contain the general cargo, the passengers' dining-saloon and other apartments, the sleeping berths, and the skipper's steering-box or outlook. These boats, at all events on the inland waters of British Columbia, draw only a very few feet of water at the bow. This is to allow them to push their noses on to the sandy shore when called upon to land or take on board passengers or cargo. The country is not yet old enough to afford landing-stages at every stopping-place. Sometimes, indeed, a landing-place is marked by only a single, solitary house; often by not more than two or three houses at the most.
And how small, how toy-like, a single house looks when clinging in isolated sovereignty to the foot of these mountain masses! Nor is a village in a similar situation able to invest itself with any higher dignity than such as belongs to the doll-like. So dwarfing is the effect of stupendous masses of sky-aspiring rock when contrasted with the work of human hands!
When we entered the west arm of Kootenay Lake at the narrow gateway of Procter, the lake instantly assumed a different character. If hitherto we had been steaming up a Canadian Norwegian fjord, we now began to navigate a Canadian Scottish loch. The mountains were more rounded in outline; their flanks, while not less steep, wore a more friendly and genial aspect; the strips of land at their feet were broader and had a more home-like look. Across the hollows of the mountains there hung in many places a thin vapoury haze of deep and vivid purple, softening the outlines, and blending lake, mountain, and sky together in one poetic dream. Yet, owing to the chilly nature of the evening and the darkling hour at which we began our brief journey down the west arm, the general impression left upon us, wearied as we were with fourteen days of continuous travel, could not very well have been other than disappointing—disappointing, I mean, from the special point of view of the prospective fruit-rancher.
I knew there were fruit ranches on these shores, I knew the names of men who owned them. I had seen the fruit which grew on them—fruit of great excellence. We could not see them, it was true; yet there they must be.
SLEIGHING IN WINTER.W. Notman and Sons.
