The Trapper's Daughter by Gustave Aimard

Author:Gustave Aimard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620133460
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter XXI - Curumilla

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About a month after the events we have just described, in the early part of December, which the Comanches call, in their picturesque language, "the Moon of the roebuck that sheds its horns," and a few minutes after sunrise, a party, consisting of five or six men, whom, by their garb, it was easy to recognise as wood rangers from the Far West, climbed one of the highest peaks of the Sierra de los Comanches, the eastern chain of the Rocky Mountains, running down into Texas, where it terminates in the Guadaloupe mountains.

The weather was cold, and a dense layer of snow covered the sides of the mountains. The slope which these bold adventurers were following, was so scarped that, although accustomed to travel in these regions, they were often compelled to bend their backs and creep along on their hands and knees. But no difficulty baffled them, no obstacle was great enough to make them turn back.

At times, worn out with fatigue, and bathed in perspiration, they stopped to take breath, lay down on the snow, and picked up some handfuls to allay the ardent thirst that devoured them; then, after resting a little while, they courageously set out again, and clambered up the eternal ice, whose gigantic masses became with each moment more abrupt.

Were these men in search of a practicable road in this frightful labyrinth of mountains, whose peaks rose around them, at an immense height, in the icy regions of the sky? Perhaps, however, they wished, for reasons known to themselves alone, to gain a spot whence they could have an extensive prospect.

If such were their hope, it was not deceived. When, after incessant toil they all at last reached the summit of the peak they were scaling, they suddenly had before them a landscape, whose grand appearance amazed and startled them through its sublime immensity. In whatever direction they looked, they were confounded by the majesty of the panorama unfolded at their feet.

In truth, the Rocky Mountains are unique in the world, bearing no resemblance with the Pyrenees, Alps, and Apennines, and those magnificent chains of mountains which here and there stride across the old world, and seem with their barren crest to protest against the pride of creatures, in the name of the Creator.

The hunters were hanging, as it were, over a world. Beneath them was the Sierra de los Comanches, an immense mountain broken up into snowy peaks, displaying all their gloomy caverns, deep and awe-inspiring valleys, their brilliant lakes, their dark defiles and their foaming torrents, which bounded noisily downward; then, far beyond these savage limits, the eye was lost in an unbounded landscape, bathed in a hazy distance, like the surface of the sea in calm weather.

Owing to the purity and transparency of the atmosphere, the adventurers distinguished the smallest objects at a surprising distance. However, in all probability, these men had not undertaken so perilous an ascent through motives of curiosity. The mode in which they examined

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