74 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



ultimate outposts, still clung to the precipitous shores, 

 but for the most part these shores rose too abruptly 

 from the water to give any foothold, and bared ledges of 

 rock began to crop out, crowned with spired firs. The 

 wind, drawing down the lake, was churning the surface 

 into a considerable sea. Ahead of us loomed a superb 

 portal to still-further-unseen reaches of the lake, a 

 natural gateway like that to the Highlands of the 

 Hudson between Storm King and the Point, but with 

 each precipitous mountain forest-clad and devoid of any 

 human habitation, and rising nearly five thousand feet 

 sharp out of the water. Between these splendid head- 

 lands, sentinels of the major range beyond, Lake 

 Chelan stretched its dancing green pathway, foam- 

 flecked and sky-tinted, whispering of magic splendours 

 yet to come. 



Once you have entered through this majestic portal, 

 you have left the lowland world behind, the world of 

 orchards and of men, of roads and barns, of strife and 

 barter. You are afloat on an inverted sky in the heart 

 of the primal wilderness, in the depths of the tumbled 

 mountains. The lake grows no wider; if anything it 

 narrows. But it stretches onward for another forty 

 miles between two unbroken walls of naked precipice 

 and fir-clad slopes rising to castellated summits of 

 progressively greater height till the snowfields begin to 

 glitter far above your head and white streams begin to 

 flash in the forest and leap out over the rocks. The 



