Boy Scouts in the White Mountains: The Story of a Long HikeEaton, Walter Prichard
General
Boy Scouts in the White Mountains: The Story of a Long Hike
Eaton, Walter Prichard
Boy Scouts -- Juvenile fiction; Hiking -- Juvenile fiction; White Mountains (N.H. and Me.) -- Juvenile fiction
“We’ll find one--after we’ve seen the face,” the Scout Master laughed.
He looked at his watch. “After four, boys,” he added. “We’ve got to get
a camp ready, and spruce up before dinner, and I’ve got to go to the
hotel and get a shave.”
They stepped up from the railroad station to the road. Directly before
them was the Profile House, a large wooden hotel, facing south. Behind
it rose the steep wall of Cannon Mountain, and south of it, on the
lowest terrace of the slope, was a double row of cottages, ending, on
a bend, with a group including Mr. Goodwin’s. Behind the boys, back
where they had come, they could see the first steep, wooded slope of
Lafayette, and to the north the great rocky precipice of Eagle Cliff.
Looking south again, the road disappeared between the landslides of
Lafayette on the one hand, and the wall of Cannon on the other, a
narrow notch, not much wider than the road itself. The opening where
the boys stood was only large enough to hold the hotel and cottages,
and three or four tennis courts, on which a crowd was playing.
The party went south down the road, Peanut and Art pointing out Mr.
Goodwin’s house, and the track taken by the burglars, and quickly left
the houses behind. After a quarter of a mile or so, the woods opened
out ahead, and presently the boys stood in a place where the road was
enlarged to the left into a semicircle, and in that semicircle a team
or a motor could stop for the view.
“It’s the place!” cried Peanut. “Here’s where they left the car! And
those are the bushes we crawled into, Art!”
“And there’s the Old Man of the Mountain,” said Mr. Rogers.
The Scouts followed his finger. Looking through an opening in the trees
across the road, toward the southwest, they saw first a beautiful
little lake, so still that it mirrored every reflection, and then,
rising directly out of the woods beyond this lake a huge cliff, curved
at first, but gradually attaining the perpendicular till it shot up
like the side of a house, fifteen hundred feet into the air. At the
very top of it, looking southward down the valley, was, indeed, the
Old Man of the Mountain--a huge knob of rock thrust forth from the
pinnacle of the precipice, and shaped precisely like a human profile,
with sunken eye under a brow like Daniel Webster’s, sharp nose, firm
mouth, and, as Mr. Rogers said, “quite literally a granite chin.”
The boys looked at it in silence for a moment, and then Peanut said,
“But it looks so much bigger in all the pictures in the geographies.
Why, it really looks as small up there as--as the moon.”
“That’s because the photographs of it are taken with a telescope lens,
I guess,” said Frank. “My camera would make it look about six miles
off.”
“How big is it?” asked Lou.
“They say about eighty feet from forehead to chin,” the Scout Master
replied. “And it’s about fifteen hundred feet up the cliff.”
“I’d like to see it in full face,” Lou added. “Could we walk down the
road and see it that way?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account