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
Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes
the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a
logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one
cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint
of man and his works.
On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and
his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts
above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it
as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a
disconcerting bump. It stopped with violence. And when we had picked
ourselves up we looked out of the train and saw nothing--only that
particularly vicious river and those unpleasantly jagged rocks.
When one is on a Canadian bridge this is all one sees--the depth one is
going to drop, and what one is going to drop on. The top of the bridge
is wide enough for the rails only, and the sides of the carriages hang
beyond the rails. And there are no parapets. One just looks plumb
down. We looked down, and back and forward. The struts and girders of
the bridge seemed made of pack-thread and spider's web. We wondered
why we should have stopped in the middle of such a place of all places.
And the train looked so enormous. We asked the superintendent if the
bridge could hold it.
He said he thought so, but it had never been tested by such a weight
before.
From the way he said "thought," we gathered he meant "hoped."
Somebody had wanted to show the Prince the view. It was a fine view,
but we were not sorry it wasn't permanent. With the view, the Prince
took in a little shooting at clay pigeons in view of the days he was to
spend in sporting Nipigon.
We ran straight on to Nipigon, only stopping at Oba, and that in the
night. But before the night came Canada and Algoma gave us an
exquisite sunset. We saw the light of the sun on a vast stretch of
hummocks and hills of bald rock. They had been clothed with forest
before the fires had passed over them. As the sun set, an exquisite
thin cherry light shone evenly on the hills and bluffs, and on the thin
and naked trees that stood up like wands in this eerie and clarified
light. In the distance there was a faint vermilion in the sky, and
where the tree stumps fringed the bare hills, they gave the suggestion
of a band of violet edging the land. And all this in an air as clear
and shining as still water. It seemed to me that Canada was waiting
there for a painter of a new vision to catch its wonder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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