To-day, this road is born. When will it die? We fall into a
way of thinking it is here for eternity, but railways vanish like
everything else. Even the great Appian Way, which lasted for over two
thousand years, has, in these last centuries, become little more than a
name.

To build even one of our railways, a hundred forests are sacrificed,
and, in the uncanny gloom of the dead country which lies in the heart
of the earth, thousands of bowed, grim workers toil, Vulcan-like, for
the iron to make its spikes and nails.

The railroad seems like a huge centipede with rails for the body, ties
for the limbs and smoke for the breath. The men who stand by her side
are the waiters who feed her with coal and slake her thirst with water.
Sometimes, when she is weary of the freightage these men lay upon her,
she rises and crushes it to atoms. Men call this happening "a broken
rail" or "an open switch," but we know better.

Or we may think of the railroad as a streak of light through desolate
places telling the pioneer to be strong and of good courage with the
hope of better days.

Or, again, it is a belt which binds the lustrous provinces of the East
and West into the eager land of Canada. What odds that the belt,
partaking of its environment, is rocky here or sandy there, so long as
it be really a belt?

No one can truly say when this road will die. It may be--if one may
hazard so saucy a suggestion--that the airships will kill her by taking
her traffic in men and merchandise. And maybe the great-grandchildren
of the "Coming Canadians" who arrived this year from Scandinavia or
Austria, will plough long furrows on her right-of-way and haul off her
bridge timbers for firewood. Guesswork all!

I might have gone on musing about this railway until now, and computing
what its advent means to the North, the country which has hitherto been
the land of the dog and the canoe, had not a commanding voice bade me
come and "drape" myself with the crowd beside the first train in order
to have my picture taken.

"I won't go! not a toe," said I, but I went, for no woman who is even
fairly normal can successfully resist having her photograph taken. She
always hopes it will turn out better than the last one, and I hoped so
too.

CHAPTER X

ON THE ATHABASCA RIVER

I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk
from a handsaw.--_Hamlet_.

All the world is a deluge of rain when we leave Athabas