risen and towered one above another till the clouds began to hang below
the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways of the slides, those
avalanches of earth, stones and trees, which descend into the hollows,
leaving vestiges of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains on each side, and a
group of mightier ones ahead. Still our road went up along the Saco,
right towards the centre of that group, as if to climb above the clouds
in its passage to the farther region.

In old times the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the
northern Indians coming down upon them from this mountain rampart
through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous
path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling
up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till
at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended
road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but, rending it asunder
a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden
minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost
heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This
is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to
describe it by so mean an image--feeling, as I do, that it is one of
those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not
to the conception, of Omnipotence.

We had now reached a narrow passage, which showed almost the appearance
of having been cut by human strength and artifice in the solid rock.
There was a wall of granite on each side, high and precipitous,
especially on our right, and so smooth that a few evergreens could
hardly find foothold enough to grow there. This is the entrance, or, in
the direction we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile of