Canada -- Description and travel; Canadian poetry -- History and criticism
"I have a large, beautiful state-room alone--every state-room on
these steamers is an outside one; the entire steamer is richly
carpeted in soft moss-green; finished in the native woods, polished
till you could use the woodwork for a mirror (and if it reflected you
how decorative it would be!); beside that, there are mirrors galore,
of the regulation order, and a news-stand with all the world's
literature, so to speak; the most delightful bathrooms, but I don't
spend the entire time at sea in salt baths, as you unkindly {203}
assert; the table is excellent, being rather noted, I am told, for
its fine cuisine, and there is to me a very direct connection between
delicious coffee and various accompaniments, and feeling 'up' to
things for the day; anyway, everything is delicious, and the
splendid, spacious decks to enjoy a paradise of walking on;
writing-desks well stocked with stationery at every turn, on every
deck; and these steamers are 'twin-screw' if you know what that
means! I confess I don't! but apparently people who do know consider
a 'twin' screw as of far more importance in the universe than one
lone, lorn screw; and they are equipped with wireless telegraph (I do
know what that means) and with oil engines, and every modern device
of safety, and with fairly luxurious comfort; and, indeed, the whole
voyage is ideal and has only one fault--alas! alas! that it will
come to an end. If only it would never end! I count off the flying
hours as a miser counts his gold, I can hardly bear to sleep to miss
one hour of its glory and loveliness, yet sleep, too, is a joy in
this magical air, and, at all events, this voyage will not be ended
when it is over. I shall have it all the rest of my life ... to live
over again and again 'in the ethereal,' where all outer experiences
find their record. I am quite sure the Recording Angel sets this
down in illuminated pages."
From Puget Sound 500 miles of the voyage is through Canadian waters,
so vast is the Dominion. For one hundred and twenty miles the
steamer is {204} sailing through the Straits of Georgia, which
separates the main land of British Columbia from Vancouver Island,
with the range of the Olympic Mountains astern, from whence the gods
look down on mortals. Do they not, indeed, dwell on Olympian
heights? Passing into the Seymour Narrows from the Georgian Strait,
the Channel is hardly more than one third of a mile wide, and the
rocky walls with the lofty mountains just behind are so overgrown
with trees as to present an almost solid wall of emerald green,
tempting the passenger to reach out his hand and grasp the cedar
needles that seem so near. On sunny days the reflections in the
water are bewilderingly clear, and here and there pour down rushing
cataracts of foam-crested water from the melting snow of the
mountains.
[Illustration: Indians spearing Salmon in Bulkley Cañon]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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