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Page 21
Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed
as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock
now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water
gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between
the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance
of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get
together? Let us see.
After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this
vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed
round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed
in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way
along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river,
perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake
may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to
pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock
deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty
Niagaras.
I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a
mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a
precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed
under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and
every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of
tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the
plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew
three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep.
Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric
Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.
The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand
miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern
border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side
of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to
what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of
work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the
depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths.
Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying
hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say,
half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are
various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular
sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The
outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood
and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the
chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.
We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the
mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the
rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off
whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much
narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the
great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting
lateral ca�ons down to the central flow. Between these stand the
little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.
I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked
leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone
written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of
one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by
the same forces and for the same end.
Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to
stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole
day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles
of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over
two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down
thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was
an immense day's work.
The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses
never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn
seen close by from its H�rnli shoulder.
There was the river--a regular freight train, running day and night,
the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the
elevated road of the upper air)--burdened with dissolved rock and earth.
A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed
rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the
sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in
uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it
has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.
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