- end_line
- 7682
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.985Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7625
- 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 vapours curled up from
its white-wooded top, as from a chimney. The intense congelation made
the whole country look like one petrifaction. 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 remorselessly 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 uphill. 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 uphill, 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 dash-board, 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 roadside
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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