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 rushing 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 ship 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 ship 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell of the awful push and stress of the t.i.tanic struggle.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
Ill.u.s.tration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of the water and building such a solid wall of sh.e.l.l that no fierceness of the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that they may drink.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier, scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the sh.o.r.e. The one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and carries away arch and sh.o.r.e alike. At some points a careful and even admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless tooth gnaws on unceasingly.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience there that did not result quite so disastrously.
The ill.u.s.tration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut through the rocky barrier of the sh.o.r.e. But in this case the trend of the less hard rock was at such an angle to the sh.o.r.e that the sea broke into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two entrances forced the pa.s.sage one hundred and forty paces inland. It terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which are not shown in the picture.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Arch Remains Side Wall Broken, Santa Clara, Cal.]
What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day.
There rest in nature"s own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights, as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."
THE POWER OF VEGETABLE LIFE
I have a great variety of little ma.s.ses of matter--some small as a pin"s blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin"s head. They are smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense individuality, are so self-a.s.sertive, that by no process can those of one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little ma.s.ses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds.
Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes gra.s.s--soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy quickly. Gra.s.s today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven.
Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown, hard-sh.e.l.led, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird"s.
The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life.
Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play.
They first open the hard sh.e.l.l from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong.
They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California"s big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high.
How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be!
First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination?
That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce gra.s.s or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only _sequoia gigantea_.
There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped--subulate. Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one. It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life. The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.