1889 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



185 



0ai^ JieMEp. 



NOTES OF TRAVEL. 



If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, 

 from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call 

 the Sabbath a delight, the hoiy of the Lord, honor- 

 able; and shalt honor him, not doing- thine own 

 ways, nor finding- thine own pleasure, nor speaking 

 thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself 

 in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the 

 high places of the earth, and feed thee with the 

 heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the 

 Lord hath spoken it.— Isaiah, 58: 13, 14. 



8UR next adventure was crossing the 

 main range of the Rocky Mountains. 

 This trip was by daylight ; and as the 

 road does not follow any stream of 

 water it was much more romantic. In 

 order to get up hill, the track runs around 

 and up, partly on one mountain 

 and then on another, and often- 

 times it runs at different heights 

 on the same hill. The conductor 

 pointed to one place during the 

 ascent, where the track could be 

 plainly seen in four different places 

 — the uppermost, clear up in the 

 clouds. As we approached the 

 summit we were greatly annoyed 

 in our view of the valley by the 

 snow-sheds, and also by the snow- 

 storms, until we got above the 

 clouds. As we neared the summit 

 still more, the coal smoke left by a 

 train just before us became very 

 unpleasant in the snow-sheds ; but 

 when we finally stopped on the ex- 

 treme summit, at Marshall Pass, 

 nearly two miles above sea-level, 

 I began to wish very anxiously to 

 have them start down again. The 

 rarity of the atmosphere made me 

 pant for breath, as if I had been 

 climbing the mountain, when I 

 just sat there in my seat and had | 

 not walked a step. The descent 

 was much pleasanter, for the sun j 

 shone ; and when we got down in 

 the valley it was very fair summer 

 weather, while on the mountains 

 it snowed and blew, and was ter- 

 ribly cold. 



After we reached the summit 

 of the mountain, of course we did 

 not need the two locomotives that 

 had pulled us up, therefore one of 

 them started on ahead in order to 

 be at the foot of the mountain 

 when the next train came along, 

 going in an opposite direction. 

 This solitary locomotive, as it 

 wound its way through the rocky 

 cliffs, and threaded its way down 

 below, was a most interesting sight 

 to me, for it indicated more plain- 

 ly the curves in and out. I can 

 not tell it. My gift of language 

 is not equal to the occasion ; but I 

 can come pretty near it by quoting 

 an extract from the same book I 

 have quoted from before — "The Crest of 

 the Continent." You will notice that the 

 author was going in an opposite direction 

 from myself. 



To attain this height, the road has to twist and 

 wriggle in the most confusing way, going three or 

 four miles, sometimes, to make fifty rods; but all 

 the time it gains ground upward, over some start- 

 ling bridges, along the crest of huge fillings, 

 through miniature canyons blasted out of rock or 

 shoveled through gravel, and always up slopes 

 whose steepness it needs no practiced eye to ap- 

 preciate. To say that the road crosses a pass in the 

 Rocky Mountains 10,820 feet in height is enough to 

 astonish the conservative engineers who have 

 never seen this audacious line; but you can mag- 

 nify their amazement when you tell them that 

 some of the grades are 220 feet to the mile. 



We have just passed through Grand Can- 

 yon, on the Arkansas River. It is much 

 like Black Canyon, only the cliffs are still 

 higher. Some of them that hang right over 

 the cars as they thunder along, 1 do believe 

 are fully three-fourths of a mile to the top. 

 Many of these great leaning cliffs are ap- 



THE ROYAL GORGE. 



parently of rocks so loose and rotten that a 

 little jar might set them tumbling. Many 

 of them greatly resemble a certain kind of 

 rotten wood, both in appearance and color. 



