During the night the rain stopped again. A fresh wind coming from the mountains brought beautiful if cold weather. As it was Sunday today, there would be no train today and I only managed to get a special train thanks to the outstanding courtesy of the railway administration. The train was set to depart at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Up to then, I stayed on board due to the cold I was still afflicted with, while my gentlemen undertook an armed promenade to the heights situated above the station and returned with some grouses of a smaller species. Later we tried to fish with rods but remained mostly without success even though some Englishmen we had observed at the same spot the evening before had caught beautiful salmon trouts there.

In the special train that consisted of two sleeping cars and a monster of a locomotive we were greeted friendly by smiling Mr. Fisher, a mulatto who had served us already during the railway journey from Vancouver. We flew through the already known pretty region towards the main line which we reached at Sicamous. About an hour before this station the railway comes close to the shore of a bulge of Shuswap Lake, that lies elongated and earnest between dark forests. Only a bark canoe steered by Indians, some individual great loons and now and then a flock of ducks were to be seen on the smooth surface of the lake. New snow that had fallen during the night covered the mountain ridges. The bleak fir trees looked quite delightful in their white dress that they probably put on the first time in this year. After Sicamous station we soon turned away from the lake shore into a densely filled forest landscape that is criss-crossed in many bends of the small Spallumsheen River. It is pleasant to see large stretches of forest here that had not yet been touched by fire.

The sunset brought a surprise, namely a kind of alpenglow, I had not seen before during this week and which was incomparably beautiful. In an otherwise cloudy sky the heights were glowing in the most intense red that bled into a purple at the lower end and stood out sharply against the already shadowed parts of the forests, while the snowy peaks were tinted in light pink. This gorgeous color effect lasted for nearly half an hour.

Late in the evening we were in Revelstoke where we left the wagons and embarked on the river steamboat „Columbia“ owned by the Columbia and Kootenay Steam Navigation Company. With it we would drive down on the Columbia river in order to take the railway again at Northport that would transport us to our next destination, Yellowstone Park. „Columbia“ is built according to the same system as „Aberdeen“ only bigger in all its dimensions so that it could take in up to 100 first class passengers. But it seems to be quite old and in need of repairs, as everywhere it was posted that the life-belts were to be found under the beds in each cabin. In my cabin I discovered that I could look through yawning gaps in the ship’s side while it directly rained through the deck on the bed of one of the other gentlemen.

Links

• Location: Revelstoke, Canada
• ANNO – on 17.09.1893 in Austria’s newspapers.
• The k.u.k. Hof-Burgtheater is playing the comedy „Die Welt, in der man sich langweilt“. The k.u.k. Hof-Operntheater is performing the opera „Manon“.