60 
THE MAINE WOODS. 
water near our camping-ground, we gradually swerved 
to the west, till, at four o’clock, we struck again the tor¬ 
rent which 1 have mentioned, and here, in view of the 
summit, the weary party decided to camp that night. 
While my companions were seeking a suitable spot 
for this purpose, I improved the little daylight that was 
left, in climbing the mountain alone. We were in a deep 
and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds, at an angle 
of nearly forty-five degrees, and hemmed in by walls of 
rock, which were at first covered with low trees, then 
with impenetrable thickets of scraggy birches and spruce- 
trees, and with moss, but at last bare of all vegetation 
but lichens, and almost continually draped in clouds. 
Following up the course of the torrent which occupied 
this, —- and I mean to lay some emphasis on this word 
up, — pulling myself up by the side of perpendicular 
falls of twenty or thirty feet, by the roots of firs and 
birches, and then, perhaps, walking a level rod or two in 
the thin stream, for it took up the Whole road, ascending 
by huge steps, as it were, a giant’s stairway, down which 
a river flowed, I had soon cleared the trees, and paused 
on the successive shelves, to look back over the country. 
The torrent was from fifteen to thirty feet wide, without 
a tributary, and seemingly not diminishing in breadth as 
I advanced ; but still it came rushing and roaring down, 
with a copious tide, over and amidst masses of bare rock, 
from the very clouds, as though a waterspout had just 
burst over the mountain. Leaving this at last, I began 
to work my way, scarcely less arduous than Satan’s an¬ 
ciently through Chaos, up the nearest, though not the 
highest peak. At first scrambling on all fours over the 
tops of ancient black spruce-trees (Abies nigra), old as 
the flood, from two to ten or twelve feet in height, their 
