Westward with the Prince of WalesNewton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
History
Westward with the Prince of Wales
Newton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
Canada -- Description and travel; Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing,
walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not
satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty. And it is, of
course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by
consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the
Canadians and Americans sign themselves:
"_Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane. We are on our honeymoon._"
The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the
immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful
roads. There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal
mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of
enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.
The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a
little cavern deep in the hillside--a cavern made almost impregnable by
smell. In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole
through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of
the spring. Now the Government has arranged things better. It has
carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big
swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with
all modern accessories.
III
From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train
carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as
he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.
At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the
sea-level, but the Chateau and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince
climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the
mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side
of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional
breather in a deep pool, over rocks.
The Chateau is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and
perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting
of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but,
thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough
to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier
that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light
of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the
windows or the broad lawns of the Chateau, for the mountain and glacier
is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other
mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining
of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of
the valley.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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