Free Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier Page A

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.
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    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 even lonesome 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 guessed at the route they ought to take.
    Late, long after midnight, they came to a dark chapel on a hill above the road and a river. They went in out of the rain and slept stretched out on pews in their sodden clothes.
    Morning broke to fog, but its brightness announced that it would burn off quickly. Monroe rose stiffly and walked outside. Ada heard him laugh and then say, Powers that be, I thank you yet again.
    She went to him. He stood before the chapel grinning and pointing above the door. She turned and read the sign: Cold Mountain Assembly.
    —We have against all odds arrived at home, Monroe had said. At the time, it was a sentiment Ada took with a great deal of skepticism. All of their Charleston friends had expressed the opinion that the mountain region was a heathenish part of creation, outlandish in its many affronts to sensibility, a place of wilderness and gloom and rain where man, woman, and child grew gaunt and brutal, addicted to acts of raw violence with not even a nod in the direction of self-restraint. Only men of gentry affected underdrawers, and women of every station suckled their young, leaving the civilized trade of wet nurse unknown. Ada's informants had claimed the mountaineers to be but one step more advanced in their manner of living than tribes of vagrant savages.
    In the weeks that followed their arrival, as she and Monroe visited current and potential members of his congregation, Ada discovered that these people were indeed odd, though not exactly in the ways predicted by Charlestonians. During their visits they found the people to