Delphi complete works of.., p.775
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 775
We wind up a road that has been cut as a spiral of gradual ascent, never too steep for the horse to walk, just too steep for the horse to run. All the mountain has a thin cover of trees through which one sees more and more of the widening prospect below — the city, the river, and the country beyond. Then as we turn the last wind of the winding road round a corner of rock we lose sight of the city, and there we are on the open “top” of the mountain — not the highest point but what is evidently the top. It is a great hollow space, mostly open grass dotted with bushes, sunk like a shallow bowl with banks of trees rising all round it. Sometimes we can see no further than these trees, but here and there we can see, through gaps in them, ever so far away, a glimpse to the north of a “vast and beautiful country” — the woods of Vaudreuil — reaching to the Laurentian Mountains.
Sunk in the bottom of the bowl is a beautiful artificial pond, almost a little lake, with flagstoned banks and beds of flowers all in a row — a bit of art against nature. This, we are told, was long ago a beaver pond.
The mountaintop suggests, you say, the crater of a volcano. Why, that’s exactly what it is, not exactly what the geologist would call a crater, but the stump of a volcano that has blown its top off, crater and all. This that is left is what geology calls the “plutonic core,” once just a shapeless bulk of bare rock. Time’s hand has long since covered it to make it nature’s garden.
That was long, long ago, long even to a geologist, although they have their own way of reckoning time. One of the most distinguished of our Canadian geologists wrote, as a part of his legacy to us, a marvelous book on the formation of this part of North America. He called it The Last Million Years. He didn’t mean to be funny; he only meant that he was not dealing with antiquity. But even he would admit that it must be a long time since the Mount Royal volcano was active. Dr. Frank Adams, the distinguished professor emeritus of McGill, the leading authority on the subject, reckons it from thirty to forty million years. Yet even that, from Dr. Adams’ point of view, was not the geological beginning of Montreal. Deep down under the mountain itself is the bed of old Laurentian rock; overlying that is what is called familiarly (by geologists) the Ordovician, a bed of rocks mostly limestone in which are found marine fossils from the ancient sea and through which the mountain broke upward. The volcanic action shot a great shaft of steam and ashes and uptorn rock toward the sky. As the column fell it tore away the core of the volcano itself, leaving only this core. Later came the glacial age, burying all under ice, to leave behind the “moraine,” boulder clay. Over this came the present upper surface of post-glacial deposit, clay and sand.
This means, then, that there was a time when these pleasant hollows, this wide sunken cup that marks the empowered summit of Mount Royal, showed the place where the volcano, long ages ago, blew off its top. Time must have been when the glow of the angry fires lit up the sky and reflected on the waters of the inland sea that then lay at the foot of the mountain, must have carried far across to the north to be reflected from the fireless stones that are the Laurentian Hills.
The fires died. The rock cooled into a solid mass, riven here and there with faults and channels, to be filled later with other molten rock, their traces visible today. Over the surface the wind and sun and rain, the bursting ice and the melting snow, broke and wore down the rock to form the thin soil that now covers Mount Royal and clings to its abrupt sides. Down from its sides the streams and rivulets carried the soil to the mountain foot to spread it wide at the base. This flat layer of uneasy sand and clay could bear the trifling weight of Cartier’s Hochelaga, even as magnified into Ramusio’s fanciful drawing. But it was to become the despair of the modern architect and builders, whose houses leaned crookedly sideways, leering with premature old age, till they learned to pierce down and search for a foundation on the moraine, or lower still on the plutonic core, or lower still on the Ordovician rock. The bedrock of Laurentian they cannot reach. As the mountain cooled and crumbled the great inland sea beside it shrank and drained away from the upheaving earth, to leave nothing but the three streams of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Richelieu hurrying along the hollows of its lower bed. Seen thus, what Cartier saw, the waving trees, the grassy slopes, is but a thing of yesterday. Nature with a twist of the hand (or of the equinoxes) could turn it all back again to the fierce, lifeless panorama of fire and rock from which it began.
Cartier dreamed of empire and of the Kingdom of Faith . . . Champlain, of inland waterways and a metropolis. The geologist, of these vanished fires and this forgotten sea. Which dream is the dreamiest?
But that’s enough geology. As we drive along the high side of the bowl the city is hidden still but one sees, off in the other direction, and rising clear above the trees, the great dome of the basilica of the Shrine of St. Joseph, so vast that it seems to dwarf even nature itself. Indeed the nature lover, if unaware of its meaning and sacred character, might well think it a blot on the landscape. Yet this shrine has acquired within the last forty years a reputation almost equal to that of the famous Ste. Anne de Beaupré beside Quebec. Here was built at the close of the nineties by the Corporation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, whose college stands near by, a chapel to contain a statue of St. Joseph. Here began the ministrations of Brother André, presently called the Miracle Man of Mount Royal. The wonderful cures effected and the spiritual relief afforded to thousands of the sick and the lame led to the building, behind this shrine, of the great basilica. It stands on the rising slope at the foot of the Little Mountain. It can accommodate five thousand people. It rises two hundred feet high. Up the one hundred stone steps that lead to its doors the supplicants climb on their knees, in the two great public supplications for divine intercession held every year on May 10 and on Labor Day.
But our winding through the trees on the mountaintop has now brought us from the bowl back again to the face overlooking the city and we are now at the point of the mountain called Observation Point, or commonly the Look Out. It is by no means the highest point on the mountain but it commands the widest prospect. A natural projecting ledge of the rocky mountainside here falls away sharply so that a wide-open view, a panorama, is afforded, both far to the right and far to the left, over the trees and the city and up and down the river and across the river. This ledge has been converted to a wide, semicircular pavement, some two hundred feet across, with a cement balustrade over which, on such a lovely day as this, lean little groups of people, looking at the view.
Suppose we let the cabman go; we don’t need him — we can walk down. What about giving him . . . You remember what he said about Sir Henry? Good, I will.
As we look out over the balustrade it is the sense of distance that first strikes us, just as it did Jacques Cartier: miles and miles of it, clear away to a dim, flat horizon with mountains on it here and there, each little block of them dimmer than the last. We are looking right out over the city, over the trees just below us — we can almost touch the tops — and beyond it over the St. Lawrence coming down from our right, as far away as we can see, passing below us in the foreground, and then moving on to the left to be lost again where the shoulder of the mountain blocks our sight.
But for the moment the distance holds us. Those nearest mountains — they are over twenty miles away — are over beside the Richelieu. The tallest one, reaching to a high point from which there must be a wonderful view all round the compass at once, is Beloeil — or “good eye” — which is the French for what they call Bellevue in the States. It overlooks the Richelieu. Our little guidebook tells all about Fort Sorel and Fort Chambly and the Indian Wars and the Patriots of 1837, but we don’t need that. We had that in Chapter Four. Our cabman, if we had kept him, would have told us about the horse show at Sorrel last fall and say we ought to come back for it this fall, but he’s off, trundling down the winding slopes at a pleasant jog trot, half asleep under the leaves, as happy as the horse. So we can pick the mountains out for ourselves — Rougemont, and that one like a sugar cone must be Johnson. How far away is it? Let me look it up — a hundred and twenty-four miles! Just imagine that! A hundred and twenty-four miles! — oh, wait, I beg your pardon — twenty-four miles! — imagine that instead! Further still to the southeast is the dim outline of the Green Mountains in Vermont, seventy-eight miles away, and almost straight south, the top end of the Adirondacks, sixty miles away. Looking at them, our eye catches the river again, far away to the right; the Lachine Rapids — we can just see them or just not see them — they are half hidden by islands. To see them you must take a flying carpet and fly to them from the mountain, and make it not the end of May but the end of March, with the river breaking open and all one wild roar of rushing water and breaking ice that you hear half a mile away. Stand at the turn of the old Lachine Road, lonely still, and you can hear the sound come from across the river and from down the stream, the “hiss” of the smashed ice rushing past your feet and the undertone, the “roar,” from a mile away . . . “My hair stood on end,” said Champlain at the terror of it.
But come back; get on the carpet and come up; turn it back to the thirtieth of May. And let us look down at the nearer view, the city itself, the towering stone buildings of the Sun Life and the Royal Bank — that beats any rapids, doesn’t it? — and the great grain elevators . . . There’s so much on the river front that we can’t see the ships, not the ones in dock. The harbor lies framed between great bridges, the Jacques Cartier downstream and the Victoria up. The shipping we do not see. But look off to the left, away off; you wouldn’t realize that that’s an Atlantic liner coming up, but it is.
Then we look nearer — all the business city seems a tumble of houses and all the huddle of the slums smothered over and looking all right at a distance, as poverty always does. As we follow the city up the slope of the town, trees break out in it, and then more trees; that enchanted wood with stone tops sticking out of it is McGill University; the small object moving slowly along a road in front of it is a professor hurrying to his lecture. Beside the university lies the residential district of the rich that were — you remember we talked of it — beautiful indeed, as seen from above, as seen from here, for the trees cover all traces of the demolitions and the placards of houses for sale are too far away to read.
Even above this the houses among the trees climb higher and higher still, unwilling to let go, unwilling to admit the mountain too steep, till they reach the last, their highest thrown, in the beautiful little Redpath Crescent whose slated houses and lovely gardens we can see just below us. Just below? Why, it looks as if we could almost touch them . . . It can’t be more than, what, two hundred feet? Why, look! You can see the people, almost hear them, look at the bright dresses. Why, of course, it must be a wedding party! How charming on this lovely thirtieth of May! Good luck to them, whoever they are, starting life together, high, high up . . .
As we reach this point in our speculations we hear beside us, as coming up from among a little group of visitors looking over the balustrade, the voice of a statistician (they are not forbidden on the mountain) or, what is worse, the voice of a statistical tourist who only lives to give information, explaining:
The Island of Montreal is thirty miles long and between seven and ten miles wide. The city occupies almost one quarter of it. Montreal itself has a population of a million and Greater Montreal a million and a half. Montreal has 127 parks, playgrounds, and gardens. It has 247 churches. It has 907 miles of streets. It has 19 hospitals, 2600 manufacturing plants and 773 miles of sewers . . .
Come away! It’s time to go. And don’t admire the man’s erudition. He got it all out of the blue pages of the Montreal Telephone Book except the population: he makes that up, himself. But in any case we want to move on so as to get to the top of the mountain in the literal sense, for the high shoulder where the great cross stands is far higher up than the Observation Point.
We reach it by the winding road, or, if we like, straight through among the sparse trees of the summit of the mountain. We wish now that we had kept the cabman — it’s quite a walk. But it has been worth it, for now we can see all the lovely country beyond the mountain — the islands of Montreal and Jesus and the Laurentian Slope. Let me show you the Sault au Recollet rapids, away off this way, and now, if you want to see the St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, look right out toward — You don’t? No, perhaps not. Seems terrible, doesn’t it? — those great high walls with guards on top, walls so high that the people in the yards can never see the beauty around them; they can hear the river and not see it . . .
Look further then. Away off there is St. Eustache, where they killed the rebels — you can’t see it, but it’s there. And away at the end, most beautiful of all, is the Lake of the Two Mountains, lovely as its own name. The island ends there and where it ends is Ste. Anne’s, the village of the “evening chime” that we spoke of (you haven’t forgotten Chapter Three?), near it, mentioned three times already? Well, never mind, it’s worth it. Close by St. Anne’s — you can’t see them but you can see where they are — are some of the most beautiful country estates and lake-shore houses in all America. They look out over the lake toward the sunset. Some are historic too. They represent, and here and there part of their buildings actually were standing then, the old French “fiefs” granted and occupied as a sort of first line of defense from Indian raiders coming down the two rivers. Such is Boisbriant, just beside the little village of Senneville. It was a fief granted to Sidrac du Gue (1672), then passed into the hands of the famous Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, then to Jacques le Ber and later to Le Ber de Senneville. A round stone tower was built as a fort and windmill (1686). It underwent fierce attacks by the Iroquois in 1687 and 1691 in the first of which, at any rate, several people were massacred. A real Fort Senneville was built in 1692, its ruins still existing. After that a manor house was built, which itself was enlarged into a fort. It had a long history extending to an attack made by Benedict Arnold in 1776.
All about the present manor house and the beautiful lawn and gardens which surround it are the characteristic memorials of two and a half centuries of history, which lend distinction to these surviving remnants of New France.
When Jacques Cartier looked around this vast circuit he saw a country that seemed empty — north and south and east and west — just as nature made it. All the fifteen hundred miles south to Florida, empty; all the fifteen hundred miles north to Ungava, empty. The visitor of today looks south over the same fifteen hundred miles that is now the greatest area of industrial civilization in the world. He looks north, but beyond the Montreal islands and a little strip of ski-side of the hills all is empty still, empty, largely unknown.
Yet on the north side the available energy of water power and the latent mineral wealth (apart from coal) are incomparably greater than that to the south.
Come, it is time to get down from the mountain. There are things to do.
FOOTNOTES:
Lovell’s Montreal Guide.
A. P. Coleman, The Last Million Years, 1941.
CHAPTER XVI. L’Envoi: The Problem of a Great City
The Romans had a saying to the effect that from any one thing you could judge all others of the same class. So it is with our great American cities. If you study one, you study all. They have all had something of the same origin in the adventurous days of early settlement, of Indian warfare. All carry the same pride of achievement in the record of their foundation. Boston thinks of the Puritans and the Massachusetts Bay Colony; New York, of Hudson’s ship entering the spacious shelter of its waters; New Orleans, of old French days; and Chicago and the cities of the Mississippi Valley recall the stockade forts of the plains and the lonely grandeur of the prairies. Our early American founders stand in stone, Winthrop looking toward Maisonneuve, John Smith searching the horizon for Iberville, and Pontiac sending across the lakes from Detroit a message of good cheer to Oshkosh of Green Bay.
HENCE IT IS that in North America we can all read the story of one another’s cities with a peculiar sympathy and understanding which we cannot bring to bear on Europe. Our interest in the origins of Rome and London or in the lost antiquity of Athens may be profound, but it lacks the peculiar appeal of the cities on our own side of the ocean.
Nor is it only the origin of the cities. Their history from stage to stage runs a similar course — the early years of struggle, the beginnings of comfort, the building of real houses, the first meeting of a city council. Later comes transport, highroads that replace the trails through the forest, canals, a very wonder of the age, with canal boats seeming to the pioneers of the bush floating palaces of luxury; the railroads all put together in little bits, then turning, overnight as it seemed, into trunk lines, and with that the oncoming of the machine age; the millions of immigrants that turned frontier towns to metropolitan cities; the age of electricity and power that annihilated nature; the vast accumulations of wealth that made Europe look poor, and the spread and growth of the new industrial poverty, the reproduction of the European slum in the New World, a thing so sudden, a poverty so unexpected, that it made the life of the pioneer in his log cabin in the forest seem wealth itself.
All of our cities wear these marks of history, traced on their streets and evidenced in their monuments. Each of us can read the story of any American city without a guidebook from what we know of our own. That stone figure in the breastplate and the plumed hat, with a drawn sword, that is, of course, the founder of the city. The bronze Indian crouching below the pedestal — the proper place and proper attitude for him — recalls the salvation of the city by the founder. Those military figures, with little three-cornered hats, knee breeches, and stockings, their hair in pigtails, those are the great American generals who beat the British and the great British generals who beat the Americans, and both of whom beat the French.
