The route of the railway goes over and up various steep trestles, the most startling of all being "Jacob's Ladder," elevated about thirty feet and having the steepest gradient. Here is a perfect arctic desolation, the surface being broken blocks and rough stones of schist and granite, cracked, honeycombed and moss-grown, having endured the storms and frosts of centuries. There is a little vegetation where it may get root, the reindeer-moss, saxifrage clumps and sandwort of dreary Labrador or Greenland. The view covers a wide expanse far away westward to the Green Mountains, the landscape being everywhere dark forests and peaks, with the massive slopes of Mount Clay nearer to the northward, and the whole Presidential range, Mounts Jefferson, Adams and Madison, stretching beyond. As one looks over the vast, dark, undulating wilderness of peaks, it can be realized how the flood of emotion made an entranced observer exclaim, in the hearing of Mr. Starr King, "See the tumultuous bombast of the landscape." Nearing the summit, the railway gradient is less steep, and here an opportunity is given to peer over the edge of the "Great Gulf," a profound abyss on the eastern mountain slope between Washington, Clay and Jefferson. This hollow gulf, its sides and bottom covered with dark trees, relieved by a little glistening pond at the bottom, stretches out to the narrow valley along the eastern base of the range, known as the Glen, down into which one can look at an angle of about forty-five degrees. Rounding the mountain summit, the train halts at a broad platform in front of the Summit Hotel.