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- 3832
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:45.581Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 3773
- text
- resolved to cross the mountains, some sixty miles, and order my future
paper at the Devil's Dungeon paper-mill.
The sleighing being uncommonly fine toward the end of January, and
promising to hold so for no small period, in spite of the bitter cold
I started one gray Friday noon in my pung, well fitted with buffalo
and wolf robes; and, spending one night on the road, next noon came in
sight of Woedolor Mountain.
The far summit fairly smoked with frost; white vapors curled up from
its white-wooded top, as from a chimney. The intense congelation
made the whole country look like one petrification. The steel shoes
of my pung craunched and gritted over the vitreous, chippy snow, as
if it had been broken glass. The forests here and there skirting
the route, feeling the same all-stiffening influence, their inmost
fibres penetrated with the cold, strangely groaned--not in the swaying
branches merely, but likewise in the vertical trunk--as the fitful
gusts remorseless swept through them. Brittle with excessive frost,
many colossal tough-grained maples, snapped in twain like pipe-stems,
cumbered the unfeeling earth.
Flaked all over with frozen sweat, white as a milky ram, his nostrils
at each breath sending forth two horn-shaped shoots of heated
respiration, Black, my good horse, but six years old, started at a
sudden turn, where, right across the track--not ten minutes fallen--an
old distorted hemlock lay, darkly undulatory as an anaconda.
Gaining the Bellows'-pipe, the violent blast, dead from behind, all
but shoved my high-backed pung up-hill. The gust shrieked through the
shivered pass, as if laden with lost spirits bound to the unhappy
world. Ere gaining the summit, Black, my horse, as if exasperated by
the cutting wind, slung out with his strong hind legs, tore the light
pung straight up-hill, and sweeping grazingly through the narrow notch,
sped downward madly past the ruined saw-mill. Into the Devil's Dungeon
horse and cataract rushed together.
With might and main, quitting my seat and robes, and standing backward,
with one foot braced against the dashboard, I rasped and churned
the bit, and stopped him just in time to avoid collision, at a turn,
with the bleak nozzle of a rock, couchant like a lion in the way--a
road-side rock.
At first I could not discover the paper-mill.
The whole hollow gleamed with the white, except, here and there, where
a pinnacle of granite showed one wind-swept angle bare. The mountains
stood pinned in shrouds--a pass of Alpine corpses. Where stands the
mill? Suddenly a whirling, humming sound broke upon my ear. I looked,
and there, like an arrested avalanche, lay the large whitewashed
factory. It was subordinately surrounded by a cluster of other and
smaller buildings, some of which, from their cheap, blank air, great
length, gregarious windows, and comfortless expression, no doubt were
boarding-houses of the operatives. A snow-white hamlet amidst the
snows. Various rude, irregular squares and courts resulted from the
somewhat picturesque clusterings of these buildings, owing to the
broken, rocky nature of the ground, which forbade all method in their
relative arrangement. Several narrow lanes and alleys, too, partly
blocked with snow fallen from the roof, cut up the hamlet in all
directions.
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