Night on a Mountain

— An invincible repugnance to early rising seems to have become fixed in the habit of civilized man. He gayly throws away the freshest hours of his life, and tries in vain to make up for this reckless waste by inventing ever new devices for prolonging the hours of weariness. To see the sunrise is one of those delights which he is always promising himself, but never finds time to enjoy. Even when he throws off the other trammels of civilization, and betakes himself to the sweet refreshment of nature in her most charming moods, he still continues to deprive himself of the precious benedictions of the morning, or even counts upon lying a little longer in bed as one of his summer privileges. It is too late — or too soon — to struggle against this special madness ; one has only to own up to it, and now and then, in some of those moments of rare elevation of spirit which come to all of us, to wrench himself out of himself, and rise with his rising mood to an effort that is sure to bring its own great reward.

There is a solution of the problem of early rising which has probably occurred to but few persons, namely, not to go to bed at all. This solution has been practically applied now for several years by a group of persons who have found themselves brought together by the chances of the summer into one of those rare New England farm boarding-houses where commercial profit is hidden out of sight by a spirit of gentle living. All enthusiastic lovers of outward nature, they have not been content with her sunlight aspects in wood and field and mountain, but have sought to win from her the secrets of the night as well. At least once in every summer, when the conditions of the day seem to point to a favorable night, they quietly determine to spend that night on the top of a certain mountain some two thousand feet above the sea. As soon as their plan is known they become objects of the deepest pity to their fellow-boarders. The piazza population wags its head and puts its finger to its forehead, as who should say, “ A little queer, or they would stay in their beds like other Christians.” The friends, however, take this as part of their enjoyment, and go steadily on with their preparations. A trusty man is sent up in the afternoon with a load of wraps and a few cooking utensils. He repairs the open shanty of spruce-trees, and cuts boughs for its floor and wood for a generous fire. On his way down he meets the party of from two to a dozen climbing up the beautiful wood path in time to catch the glory of the sunset.

I will confess that I too had been among the scoffers. Slave of my sleep as I am, the thought of a sleepless night brought only images of horror to my mind. So when I was actually invited to join this army of the elect, it was only on the express stipulation of a brief interval of slumber that I accepted. The day had been very warm, cloudless and clear. We gained the summit, a party of ten, in time to get our fires going and the coffee boiling before the sunset had reached a stage which forbade all thought of earthly things. As its light began to fade we finished our first supper, and begun to divide by natural affinities into silent parties of two or three, or even one, if one so pleased. Toward the west our view spread for miles along a winding valley, the broad, swift river in the midst, with its wide “intervales” gleaming in the golden light, and its border of hills rising into the distance until the valley was closed by the great peaks of the White Mountains themselves. Toward the east we looked off into a vast sea of forest, whose waves, rising ever higher and higher, wrapped the hills in their endlessly varied green.

Not a breath of air stirred the smoke that rose straight up from the camp fire between our two cabins. Only the pleasant chill of a mountain evening made us draw our wraps about us whenever we settled for a time into some new corner of the rocks, to take in, in long draughts of enjoyment, the beauty of the scene. Before the sunlight had really faded from the sky the full August moon began to give faint signs of her appearance. In an hour she possessed the world.

The singular thing was that no one was even drowsy. It cannot have been the coffee, for that had been a flat failure. It was rather a curious exaltation of one’s whole nature ; the isolation from our kind, the silence, the gorgeous spectacle of the moon-illumined valley, the weird glow of our camp fire, all combined to make us forget our bodies. The usual merriment of a picnic party was subdued into a piercing joy that was too keen for any words. The hours sped by, as they do for all who brave the traditions of the night. Each hour brought its change, and each change was a fresh excitement. As the valley cooled after the heat of the day, we saw the river gradually covered by a low, clinging white mist which reached upward to the tops of the lowest hills, and there stopped, so that it was to us as if the river itself had risen two hundred feet above its highest level, and had become suddenly frozen. Above its even surface the air was so clear that, as the moon got higher, the shadows of little clouds began to be seen gliding over the silver expanse. It made us realize what the river must once have been in the dim geologic past, when its waters filled the valley as it was now filled by this solid mist. This was the chief sensation of the night, a thing few of us have ever experienced, — cloud shadows thrown by a full moon upon a surface of mist.

At midnight, some of us, not because we were weary, but from mere tradition, threw ourselves upon the fragrant pine boughs and slept. Others, unwilling to lose even one moment of their precious experience, plied the fire with logs upon logs, watched for the first hints of coming dawn, and then roused the sleepers. Three o’clock brought us all upon our feet again. In the far east a faint glimmer of light showed where the day was to begin. The sunrise was beautiful, but painful. Nothing could be more exquisite than the floating pink clouds against a blue so tender that it almost eluded the sense of color. Yet there was a feeling that it was growing each moment more pronounced, more like the skies of every day. The sunset seemed to find its fitting end in the stillness of the night; the sunrise seemed somehow vulgarized by the glaring day that ended it.

As the sun rose higher the surface of the mist was troubled. As we watched it a fine cloud began to rise, and spread so rapidly that in a few minutes we were caught in it, and the whole world was shut from us. Again a few minutes and this mist cloud broke, driving up into the side valleys, and disappearing so utterly that the surface above the river lay as white and solid as when we had watched the moon shadows chasing over it. Then after an interval the same thing occurred, the valley filling and clearing again, and so it continued until the great mist river was completely broken up.

When we reached our home in the valley once more, the piazza folk overwhelmed us with sympathy that our trip had been such a dismal failure. They fancied that the solid mist in which they had lain all night had been about us too !