102 Bird-Westing 



Pacific Ocean. Passing three emerald lakes, deep set in the 

 mountains, we follow the west-bound stream down through 

 a tortuous rook-ribbon canon, where the waters are dashed 

 to foam in incessant leaps and whirls. This is Kick ing-horse 

 Pass. Ten miles further we round the base of Mount Stephen, 

 a stupendous mountain rising directly from the railway to a 

 height of more than eight thousand feet, holding on one of its 

 shoulders, and almost over our heads a glacier whose shining 

 green ice, five hundred feet thick, is slowly crowded over a 

 sheer precipice of dizzy height, and crushed to atoms below. 

 This glacier is a crescent-shaped river of ice, the further end 

 concealed behind the lofty yellow cliffs that hem it in. You 

 seem to be almost on a level with it, and at a distance of only 

 five miles or less, but it is 1,300 feet above you and over a 

 dozen miles away and almost inaccessible by reason of the 

 ravines, rocks and forest which intervene. The scenery is now 

 sublime and almost terrible. The railway clings to the moun- 

 tain side at the left, and the valley on the right rapidly 

 deepens until the river is seen as a gleaming thread over a 

 thousand feet below. Looking to the north, one of the grand- 

 est mountain valleys in the world stretches away to the north, 

 with great white glacier-bound peaks on the other side. Looking 

 ahead, the dark angular peak of Mount Field is seen. Still 

 following the river, now crossing deep ravines, now piercing 

 projecting rocky spurs, now quietly gliding through level 

 park-like expanses of greensward, with beautiful trees, pretty 

 lakelets and babbling brooks, we soon enter a tremendous 

 gorge, whose frowning walls, thousands of feet high, seem to 

 overhang the boiling stream which frets and roars at their 

 base, and this we follow for miles half shut in from the day- 

 .light. Along this vast chasm the railway runs along the edges 

 of the cliffs, and as we glance out of the car windows and look 

 down a thousand feet below we shudder at the thoughts of 

 the train leaving the track and tumbling to the depths 

 beneath. What with the roar below and the noise of the 

 train, increased a hundred-fold by the echoing walls, the pas- 

 sage of the terrible gorge will never be forgotten. 



