Part 7 (1/2)
Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across.
It leaps and boils two feet high. It deposits nothing till the water comes to the cooling edge. Then it builds up a wall where it overflows, and wherever it flows it builds. The result is that you walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the circ.u.mference. If there is but little overflow, the result may be to deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular wall around the cup two or ten feet high. If the overflow is too much to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one hundred feet from the point of issue. If the overflow is sufficient, it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot being wet.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.]
Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be a.s.sorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths. Suppose a low cone to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful geyser. The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high, making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye. You walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled except by that perpetual glory of the sunset.
Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow. Just as lakes that have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids. Where? First, against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce the opening to a mere throat. Second, each wavelet tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice. It may build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle.
Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.
I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no help from below.
I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty--but I despair. The half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Thy works, Lord G.o.d Almighty! In wisdom hast Thou made them all.
Emerson says: ”Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify.” Using these faculties and not mere eyesight, one must surely say: ”Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpa.s.ses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are.”
SEA SCULPTURE*
*Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_.
When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it, but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.
So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the sh.o.r.e at Santa Cruz, California.
There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rus.h.i.+ng with terrible might against the rocky sh.o.r.e. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the wind. No s.h.i.+p can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the rocks we will try to relate.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”The Breakers,” Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 1 of our ill.u.s.trations shows ”The Breakers,” a two-story house of that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here.
This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.
Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.
As Emerson says, ”I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like G.o.d it useth me.” There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity.
The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil sh.e.l.ls and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary ma.s.ses with a sh.e.l.l or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second ill.u.s.tration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished.
[Ill.u.s.tration: The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the sh.o.r.e. At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superinc.u.mbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.
No. 3 of the ill.u.s.trations here given represents such a great excavation one hundred feet back from the sh.o.r.e. It is one hundred and fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York, might pa.s.s or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch a s.h.i.+p with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be carried out to sea like many another.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of bones within him.
In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as the coa.r.s.e sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the projecting finger. It is often done. Ill.u.s.tration No. 4 shows at low tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the pier stands lonely in the sea.