Читать книгу Arctic Searching Expedition (Sir John Richardson) - comprehensive & illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition) онлайн

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The ascent to the summit of the water-shed between Lakes Superior and Winipeg, by the Kamenistikwoya River, is made by about forty portages, in which the whole or part of a canoe's lading is carried on the men's shoulders; and a greater number occur in the descent to the Winipeg. The summit of the water-shed is an uneven swampy granitic country, so much intersected in every direction by lakes that the water surface considerably exceeds that of the dry land. Its mean elevation above Lake Superior is about eight hundred feet, and the granite knolls and sand-banks, which vary its surface, do not rise more than one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet beyond that general level, though their altitude above the river valleys which surround them is occasionally greater, giving the district a hilly aspect. The highest of these eminences does not overtop Thunder Mountain and some other basalt-capped promontories on Lake Superior, and had not the silurian strata, which, judging by the patches which remain, once covered the gneiss and granitic rocks nearly to their summits, been removed, the country would have been almost level, and would have formed part of the rolling eastern slope of the continent, above whose plane the highest of the hills on Lake Superior scarcely rises. The summit of this water-shed of the St. Lawrence basin, commencing towards the Labrador coast, runs south 52° west, or about south-west half-west, at the distance of rather more than two hundred miles from the water-course, until it comes opposite to that elbow of the line of the great lakes which Lake Erie forms; it then takes a north 51° west course, or about north-west half-west, towards the north-east end of Lake Winipeg, and onwards from thence in the same direction to Coronation Gulf of the Arctic Sea. The angle at which the two arms of this extensive water-shed (but no where mountain ridge) meet between Lakes Huron and Ontario is within half a point of a right one, and the character of the surface is everywhere the same, bearing, in the ramifications and conjunctions of its narrow valleys filled with water, no distant resemblance to the fiords of the Norway coast. Such a preponderance of fresh water, coupled with the tardy melting of the ice in spring, makes a late summer, and augments the severity of the climate beyond that which is due to the northern position of the district. Though the whole tract is most unfavourable for agriculture, much of the scenery abounds in picturesque beauty. Of this we have an instance in the Thousand Islands Lake, which forms the funnel-shaped outlet of Lake Ontario. At this place the pyrogenous rocks, denuded of newer deposits, cross the river to form a junction with the lofty highlands of the northern counties of New York. The round-backed, wooded hummocks of granite which constitute the more than thousand islets of this expanse of water, are grouped into long vistas, which are alternately disclosed and shut in as we glide smoothly and rapidly among them, in one of the powerful steamers, that carry on the passenger traffic of the lakes. The inferior fertility of this granite belt has deferred the sweeping operations of the settler's axe; the few farm-steadings scattered along the shore enhance the beauty of the forest; and the eye of the traveller finds a pleasant relief in contemplating the scenery, after having dwelt on the monotonous succession of treeless clearances lower down the river. Sooner or later, however, the shores of the Lake of the Thousand Isles will be studded with the summer retreats of the wealthy citizens of the adjacent states, and the incongruities of taste will mar the fair face of nature.