148 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

of our readers, is this: The white man’s shoes having
become thoroughly wet during the storm, and being
continually used sidewise against a very steep slope,
had been put out of shape while soft. Now that they
had dried and hardened in that state, they pinched his
feet in an excruciating way. To somewhat mitigate
the consequent agony, they went farther up, to the very
top of the range, from which, they had a veritable map
of the country unfolded at their feet. The explorer
himself describes it:—

“Pending the return of my two companions, I
contemplate the wild beauty of our American country,”
he writes. ‘It isareal ocean of mountains, that region
into which we have painfully penetrated: Fortresses
with battlemented ramparts, Gothic or Byzantine
cathedrals solidified by robust buttresses, colossal
saws which cleave the clouds, gigantic pyramids per-
haps as old as those stars towards which they raise
their white summits, immense rounded cones clad with
perpetual snows which, through the reflected rays of
the sun, glitter as so many balloons sprinkled over with
diamond dust, our mountains assume all those forms,
attire themselves in every one of those ornaments.’’!?

We are now brought to the afternoon of Saturday.
Tired out and exhausted beyond description—at least
the priest is, for though much more heavily loaded,
his men scarcely feel the fatigue—we are now con-
fronted by two remarkable incidents, which may per-
haps tax the credulity of some readers, though Father
Morice is quite positive about the least detail of them.

For some time, almost ready to give out at any
moment, the white traveller had been lagging so far
behind his companions that, to prevent his getting lost,
the youngest of the party, Jean-Marie, had been

10 Au Pays de l’Ours Notr, pp. 272-73.