Kaien Island, upon which the main part of the city will stand, comprises some 28 square miles lying 550 miles north of Vancouver. From the magnificent harbour the island rises imperiously, dominated by its central peak, Mount Hays, which towers to some 2300 feet in the clear air, with a {191} grandeur of outlook that the artistic genius of Messrs. Brett and Hall admirably utilised in a way that insures the young city so novel and delightful a background. From Mount Hays the view over the harbour, the islands, and the far waters of the Pacific, and over lakes, forests, and rivers on the mainlands, is a view to be included among the noblest scenic delights of the world. No more romantic panorama discloses itself from Amalfi, Hong Kong, or from the Acropolis of Athens. Nor is Prince Rupert icebound and stormbound in the winter, for the Japanese current that washes the shores insures an open harbour all the year round. The entrance to the bay is singularly commodious and is usually free from fog. The harbour of Prince Rupert has every claim to be considered one of the finest in the world. The task on which Messrs. Brett and Hall entered was a novel one. It was nothing less than the creation of a city seen in ideal vision. On the actual site was a waste and wild of rocks and stones, of tangled undergrowth and huge stumps of trees that had been felled. The mountain, also, had to be reckoned with, and even if the Boston landscape experts had possessed that traditional faith which is said to be able to remove mountains, they did not wish to remove Mount Hays. Like Mount Royal, in stately, splendid Montreal, the mountain was the most picturesque of assets. Here and there some giant tree had escaped the fate of its companions, and stood as if contemplating their fate. The uncompromising debris, the {192} rocky sub-stratum, the abounding mass of loose stone, all combined to present difficulties. "Prince Rupert! A town hewn out of solid rock," has since that day been the description of the new city, quoted with appreciative interest. How did Messrs. Hall and Brett attack the problem? It was a complexity of topography that baffled, if it did not defy, solutions. But Nature yields, perforce, to the necromancy of genius, and the initial achievement was to create a series of planes, planes level, planes inclined, and they then discovered that the trend of all these was, naturally, from north-east to south-west. Nature smiled upon them to the degree of establishing the means for all these planes to be, approximately, parallel in direction. Doubtless these landscape creators (being Bostonians) congratulated themselves in true Emersonian phrase on the truth that: "... the world is built in order And the atoms march in tune."