Free Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

left and right by bower and thicket, and it folded back upon itself in an endless succession of switchbacks as it ascended a narrow vale. The blue sky became but a thin cut above the dark slopes. They crossed and recrossed an upper branch of the French Broad and once passed so near a waterfall that the cold spray wet their faces.
    Ada had never seen mountains other than the rocky Alps before and was not sure what to make of this strange and vegetal topography, its every cranny and crag home to some leafy plant foreign to the spare and sandy low country. The spreading tops of oak and chestnut and tulip poplar converged to make a canopy that crowded out the sunlight. Close to the ground, azalea and rhododendron ranked up to make an understory thick as a stone wall.
    Nor was Ada easy in her mind with this land’s pitiful and informal roads. So inferior were these rutted tracks to the broad and sandy pikes of the low country that they seemed more the product of roaming cattle than of man. The road decreased in width at every turning until Ada became convincedthat the way would soon disappear altogether, leaving them adrift in a wilderness as trackless and profound as that which leapt up when God first spoke the word
greenwood
.
    Monroe, though, was in high glee for a man so recently hemorrhaging. He looked about as if he had been charged, upon penalty of death, with remembering every fold of terrain and every shade of green. Periodically, he startled the horse by suddenly declaiming lines from Wordsworth in a loud voice. When they rounded a bend and stopped before a distant pale vista of the flat country they had left behind, he hollered, “Earth has not anything to show more fair. Dull would be the soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty.”
    Later in the afternoon, when the sky had filled with roiling clouds driven by an eastering wind, they paused amid a stand of black balsam where the track topped out at Wagon Road Gap. From there the way ahead plunged alarmingly to follow the fall of waters down a roaring fork of the Pigeon River. Before them they could see the bulk of Cold Mountain reared up better than six thousand feet, its summit hidden by dark clouds and white fog in bands. Between the gap and the mountain was a wild and broken terrain of scarp and gorge. At that lonesome spot Monroe again called upon his favorite poet and cried, “The sick sight and giddy prospect of the raving stream, the unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—were all like workings of one mind, the features of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, characters of the great Apocalypse, the types and symbols of Eternity, of first, and last, and midst, and without end.”
    Ada had laughed and kissed Monroe’s cheek, thinking, I would follow this old man to Liberia if he asked me to do so.
    Monroe then eyed the troubled clouds and raised the folded carriage top of painted and waxed canvas, as black and angular on its frame of hinged members as a bat’s wing. So new it crackled as he pulled it into place.
    He shook the reins, and the sweated gelding pitched forward, happy to be on the easy side of gravity. Soon, though, the road was at such a cant that Monroe had to set the brake to keep the cabriolet from riding up over the horse’s haunches.
    Rain fell, and then darkness. There was not moonlight nor the prick of lantern light from some welcoming home. The town of Cold Mountain was ahead, but they knew not how far. They drove on into the black, trusting the horse not to fall headlong over some rocky ledge. The lack of evenlonesome cabins indicated that they were still a way from the village. Distances, apparently, had been misjudged.
    The rain fell aslant, coming at their faces so that the top of the carriage did little good in sheltering them from it. The horse walked head down. They came to turn after turn in the road, every one unmarred by signpost. At each fork, Monroe simply