As we were creeping over the top of the dwarf wood, Cancut, who was in advance, suddenly disappeared; he seemed to fall through a gap in the spruces, and we heard his voice calling in cavernous tones.  We crawled forward and looked over.  It was the upper camp of the Bostonians.  They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss.  It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing.  If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably.  I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I saw a cork.

To this station our predecessors had come in an easy day’s walk from the river; here they had tossed through a night, and given a whole day to finish the ascent, returning hither again for a second night.  As we purposed to put all this travel within one day, we could not stay and sympathize with the late tenants.  A little more squirrel-like skipping and cat-like creeping over the spruces, and we were out among bulky boulders and rough debris on a shoulder of the mountain.  Alas! the higher, the more hopeless.  Katahdin, as he had taken pains to inform us, meant to wear the veil all day.  He was drawing down the white drapery about his throat and letting it fall over his shoulders.  Sun and wind struggled mightily with his sulky fit; sunshine rifted off bits of the veil, and wind seized, whirled them away, and, dragging them over the spruces below, tore them to rags.  Evidently, if we wished to see the world, we must stop here and survey, before the growing vapor covered all.  We climbed to the edge of Cloudland, and stood fronting the semicircle of southward view.

Katahdin’s self is finer than what Katahdin sees.  Katahdin is distinct, and its view is indistinct.  It is a vague panorama, a mappy, unmethodic maze of water and woods, very roomy, very vast, very simple,—­and these are capital qualities, but also quite monotonous.  A lover of largeness and scope has the proper emotions stirred, but a lover of variety very soon finds himself counting the lakes.  It is a wide view, and it is a proud thing for a man six feet or less high, to feel that he himself, standing on something he himself has climbed, and having Katahdin under his feet a mere convenience, can see all Maine.  It does not make Maine less, but the spectator more, and that is a useful moral result.  Maine’s face, thus exposed, has almost no features:  there are no great mountains visible, none that seem more than green hillocks in the distance.  Besides sky, Katahdin’s view contains only the two primal necessities of wood and water.  Nowhere have I seen such breadth of solemn forest, gloomy, were it not for the cheerful interruption of many fair lakes, and bright ways of river linking them.