Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 19

The dancing was followed by racing. Boys mounted bareback the springy little horses, and with their legs twisted into rope-girths--with reins, the only harness--went round the track at express speed. Young women, riding astride, their dresses tied about their knees, also raced, showing horsemans.h.i.+p even superior to the boys. The riding was extremely fine, and the little horses bunch and move with an elastic and hurtling movement that is thrilling.

The ceremony had made the bravest of spectacles. The Indian colour and romance of the scene, set in a deep cup rimmed by steep, grim mountains, the sides and icecaps of which the bright sunlight threw up into an almost unreal actuality, gave it a rare and entrancing quality.

And not the least of its picturesque attractions were the papooses in bead and fringed leather, who grubbed about in the earth with stoic calm. They looked almost too toylike to be true. They looked as though their right place was in a scheme of decoration on a wall or a mantel-shelf. As one lady said of them: "They're just the sort of things I want to take home as souvenirs."

II

Banff is an exquisite and ideal holiday place, and I can appreciate the impulse that sends many Americans as well as Canadians to enjoy its beauties in the summer.

It is a valley ringed by an amphitheatre of mountains, up the harsh slopes of which spruce forests climb desperately until beaten by the height and rock on the scarps beneath crests which are often snow-capped. Through this broad valley, and winding round slopes into other valleys, run streams of that poignant blueness which only glacial silt and superb mountain skies can Impart.

The houses and hotels in this Switzerland of Canada are charming, but the Banff Springs Hotel, where the Prince stayed, is genius. It is perched up on a spur in the valley, so that in that immense ring of heights it seems to float insubstantially above the clouds of trees, like the palace of some genii. For not only was its site admirably chosen, but the whole scheme of the building fits the atmosphere of the place. And it is as comfortable as it is beautiful.

It faces across its red-tiled, white-bal.u.s.tered terraces and vivid lawns, a sharp river valley that strolls winding amid the mountains.

And just as this river turns before it, it tumbles down a rock slide in a vast ma.s.s of foam, so that even when one cannot see its beauty at night, its roar can be heard in the wonderful silence of the valley.

On the terrace of the hotel are two bathing-pools fed from the sulphur springs of Banff, and here Canadians seem to bathe all day until dance-time--and even slip back for a moonlight bath between dancing and bed.

It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing, walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty. And it is, of course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the Canadians and Americans sign themselves:

"_Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane. We are on our honeymoon._"

The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful roads. There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.

The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a little cavern deep in the hillside--a cavern made almost impregnable by smell. In the old days the determined bather had to s.h.i.+n down a pole through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of the spring. Now the Government has arranged things better. It has carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with all modern accessories.

III

From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to acc.u.mulate beauty as he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.

At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the sea-level, but the Chateau and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side of a blue-and-white stream das.h.i.+ng downward, with an occasional breather in a deep pool, over rocks.

The Chateau is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting of a ring of ma.s.sive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but, thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier that seemed to s.h.i.+ne with curious inner lambency under the clear light of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the windows or the broad lawns of the Chateau, for the mountain and glacier is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear s.h.i.+ning of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of the valley.

Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of trees, is the home of an English woman. She used to spend her days working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely crag. She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly off to California when the winter comes. The Prince went up to take tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.

There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Chateau, and one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance during the night. In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds. He thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was attempting to sneak in by the back way. He marched up to the edge of the wood and waited in his most legal att.i.tude for the intruder--and a bear came out to meet him. Not only did it come out to meet him, but it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner. The policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.

His experience was one of the next day's jokes, since it appears that bears often do come out of the woods attracted by the smell of hotel cooking. On the whole they are amiable, and are no more difficult than ordinary human beings marching in the direction of a good dinner.

From Lake Louise the Prince went steadily west through some of the most impressive scenery in Canada. The gradient climbs resolutely to the great lift of petrified earth above Kicking Horse Pa.s.s, so that the train seemed to be steaming across the sky.

A little east of the Pa.s.s is a slight monument called "the Great Divide." Here Alberta meets British Columbia, and here a stream springs from the mountains to divide itself east and west, one fork joining stream after stream, until as a great river it empties into Hudson Bay; the other, turning west and leaping down the ledges of valleys, makes for the Pacific.

Beyond "the Great Divide" the t.i.tanic Kicking Horse Pa.s.s opens out. It falls by gigantic levels for 1,300 feet to the dim, spruce-misted valleys that lie darkly at the foot of the giant mountains. It is not a straight canyon, but a series of deeper valleys opening out of deep valleys round the shoulders of the grim slopes. Down this tortuous corridor the railway creeps lower, level by level, going with the physical caution of a man descending a dangerous slope.

The line feels for its best footholds on the sides of walls that drop sheer away, and tower sheer above. We could look over the side down abrupt precipices, and see through the dense rain of the day the mighty drop to where the Kicking Horse River, after leaping over rocky ramps and flowing through level pools, ran in a score of channels on the wide s.h.i.+ngly floor of the Pa.s.s.

Beneath us as we descended we could see the track twisting and looping, as it sought by tunnelling to conquer the exacting gradient. The planning of the line is, in its own way, as wonderful as the natural marvel of the Pa.s.s. One is filled with awe at the vision, the genius and the tenacity of those great railway men who had seen a way over this grim mountain barrier, had schemed their line and had mastered nature.

At Yoho Station that clings like a limpet near the top of this soaring barrier, the Prince took to horse, and rode down trails that wind along the mountainside through thickets of trees to Field at the foot of the drop. The rain was driving up the throat of the valley before a strong wind, and it was not a good day for riding, even in woolly chaps such as he wore, but he set out at a gallop, and enjoyed the exercise and the scenery, which is barbaric and tremendous, though here and there it was etherealized by sudden gleams of sunlight playing on the wet foliage of the mountain-side and turning the wet ma.s.ses into rainbows.

During this ride he pa.s.sed under the stain in a sheer wall of rock that gives the Pa.s.s its name. For some geological reason there is, high up in a straight ma.s.s of white towering cliff, a black outcrop that is like the silhouette of an Indian on a horse. I could not distinguish the kick in the horse myself, but I was a.s.sured it was there, and Kicking Horse is thus named.

From Field, a breathing s.p.a.ce for trains, about which has grown a small village possessing one good hotel, the Prince rode up the valleys to some of the beauty spots, such as Emerald Lake, which lies high in the sky under the cold glaciers of Mount Burgess. It was a wonderful ride through the spruce and balsam woods of these high valleys.

IV

During Sat.u.r.day, September 20th, the train was yet in the mountains, and the scenery continued to be magnificent. From Field the line works down to the level of the Columbia River, some 1,500 feet lower, through magnificent stretches of mountain panorama, and through breathless gorges like the Palliser, before climbing again steeply to the highest point of the Selkirk Range. Here the train seemed to charge straight at the towering wall of Mount MacDonald, but only because there is a miracle of a tunnel--Connaught Tunnel--which coaxes the line down by easy grades to Rogers Pa.s.s, the Illicilliwaet and Albert Canyon.

Through all this stretch the scenery is superb. In the gorges and the canyon high mountains force the river and railway together, until the train runs in a semi-darkness between sheer cliffs, with the water foaming and tearing itself forward in pent-up fury between harsh, rocky walls. Sometimes these walls encroach until the water channel is forced between two rocks standing up like doorposts, with not much more than a doorway s.p.a.ce between them. Through these gateways the volume of water surges with an indescribable sense of power.

At places, as in the valley of the Beavermouth, east of the Connaught Tunnel, the line climbs hugely upward on the sides of great ranges, and, on precarious ledges, hangs above a gigantic floor, tree-clad and fretted with water channels. The train crept over spidery bridges, spanning waterdrops, and crawled for miles beneath ranges of big timber snowsheds.

The train stopped at the pleasant little mountain town of Golden, where the Prince went "ash.o.r.e," and there was the ceremony of reception.

This was on the program. The next stop was not.

West of the Albert Canyon, at a tiny station called Twin b.u.t.te, we pa.s.sed another train standing in a siding, with a long straggle of men in khaki waiting on the platform and along the track, looking at us as we swept along. Abruptly we ceased to sweep along. The communication cord had been pulled, and we stopped with a jerk.

The Prince had caught sight of the soldiers, and had recognized who they were. He had given orders to pull up, and almost before the brakes had ground home, he was out on the track and among the men, speaking to them and the officers, who were delighted at this unexpected meeting.

The soldiers were English. They were men of the 25th Middles.e.x, H.A.C.

and other regiments, four hundred all told. They had come from Omsk, in Russia, by way of the Pacific, and were being railed from Vancouver to Montreal in order to take s.h.i.+p for home. The men of the Middles.e.x were those made famous by the sinking of their trooper off the African coast in 1916. Their behaviour then had been so admirable that it will be remembered the King cabled to them, "Well done, Diehards!"

By the isolated railway station and under the lonely mountains so far from their homes, they were drawn up, and the Prince made an informal inspection of the men who had been so long away, and who had travelled the long road from Siberia on their way Blightyward.

The inspection lasted only a few minutes, and the episode, spontaneous as it was characteristic, scarcely broke the run into Revelstoke. But it was the happiest of meetings.

Revelstoke is a small, bright mountain town known, as its inhabitants say, for snow and strawberries. It is their way of explaining that the land in this deep mountain valley is splendidly fertile, and that settlers have only to farm on a small scale in order to make a comfortable living, though in winter it is--well, of the mountains.

The fis.h.i.+ng there is also extremely good, and we were told almost fabulous tales of boys who on their journey home from school spent a few minutes at the creeks of the Columbia River, and went on their way bearing enough fish to make a dinner for a big family.

The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that climbed by corkscrew bends. This was thrilling enough, for there were abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly corners.

From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fis.h.i.+ng centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore later), where there are rich orchard lands.

With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers, those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.

A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we pa.s.sed dumps of war material, sh.e.l.ls, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver.

After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PACIFIC CITIES: VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA