Blowing Rock on one arm of a great horseshoe of mountains and Tryon Mountain upon the other arm, overlooked an enormous, primeval bowl, studded by a thousand emerald-clad eminences.

There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering and isolated pile which from time immemorial had served the aborigines as a guide in their forest wanderings; there was the dizzy height of the Roan on the border; there was Mt.

Mitchell, portentous in its grandeur, the tallest peak on the continent east of the Rockies; and there was the Grandfather, the oldest mountain on earth according to geologists, of which it has been written: Oldest of all terrestrial things--still holding Thy wrinkled forehead high; Whose every scam, earth's history enfolding, Grim science doth defy! Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising, When through space first was hurled The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising, This atom, called the World! What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer than the luxuriant vegetation and lavish profusion of the gorgeous flowers upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water--the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically celebrated in the lines: Swannanoa, nymph of beauty, I would woo thee in my rhyme, Wildest, brightest, loveliest river Of our sunny Southern clime.
* * * Gone forever from the borders But immortal in thy name, Are the Red Men of the forest Be thou keeper of their fame! Paler races dwell beside thee, Celt and Saxon till thy lands Wedding use unto thy beauty Linking over thee their hands.
The long rambling excursions which Boone made through western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee enabled him to explore every nook and corner of the rugged and beautiful mountain region.
Among the companions and contemporaries with whom he hunted and explored the country were his little son James and his brother Jesse; the Linville who gave the name to the beautiful falls; Julius Caesar Dugger, whose rock house stood near the head of Elk Creek; and Nathaniel Gist, who described for him the lofty gateway to Kentucky, through which Christopher Gist had passed in 1751.

Boone had already heard of this gateway, from Findlay, and it was one of the secret and cherished ambitions of his life to scale the mountain wall of the Appalachians and to reach that high portal of the Cumberland which beckoned to the mysterious new Eden beyond.

Although hunting was an endless delight to Boone he was haunted in the midst of this pleasure, as was Kipling's Explorer, by the lure of the undiscovered: Till a voice as bad as conscience, rang interminable changes On one everlasting whisper day and night repeated--so: 'Something hidden.