-view, and we had to
cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly
corners.

From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until
the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and
a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fishing
centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to
Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore
later), where there are rich orchard lands.

With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big
Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers,
those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad
valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the
prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are
many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.

A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight
run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of
interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we passed dumps of war
material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It
was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was
the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were
the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver.
After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there
they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PACIFIC CITIES: VANCOUVER AND VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

I

Vancouver was land after a mountain voyage. With the feelings of a
seafarer seeing cliffs after a long ocean journey, we reached common,
flat country and saw homely asphalt streets.

There can be no two points of view concerning the beauty and grandeur
of the mountain scenery through which the Prince had passed, but after
a succession of even the most stimulating gorges and glaciers one does
turn gladly to a little humanity in the lump. Vancouver was humanity
in the lump, an exceedingly large lump and of peculiarly warm and
generous emotions. We were glad to meet crowds once more.

There are some adequate streets in this great western port of Canada.
When Vancouver planned such opulent boulevards as Granville and Georgia
streets, it must have been thinking hard about posterity, which will
want a lot of space if only to drive its super