So out of
settled Virginia they rode, and up the long, gradual lift of earth above
sea-level into a mountainous wilderness, where before them the Aryan had
not come. By day they traveled, and bivouacked at night.
* On the sandy roads of settled Virginia horses went unshod, but for the
stony hills and the ultimate cliffs they must have iron shoes. After the
adventure and when the party had returned to civilization, the Governor,
bethinking himself that there should be some token and memento of the
exploit, had made in London a number of small golden horseshoes, set as pins
to be worn in the lace cravats of the period. Each adventurer to the mountains
received one, and the band has kept, in Virginian lore, the title of the
Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.
Higher and more rugged grew the mountains. Some trick of the light made
them show blue, so that they presently came to be called the Blue Ridge, in
contradistinction to the westward lying, gray Alleghanies. They were like
very long ocean combers, with at intervals an abrupt break, a gap,
cliff-guarded, boulder-strewn, with a narrow rushing stream making way
between hemlocks and pines, sycamore, ash and beech, walnut and linden.
Towards these blue mountains Spotswood and his knights rode day after day
and came at last to the foot of the steep slope. The long ridges were high,
but not so high but that horse and man might make shift to scramble to the
crest. Up they climbed and from the heights they looked across and down
into the Valley of Virginia, twenty miles wide, a hundred and twenty long -- a
fertile garden spot.
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