Hallam Hawksworth

“ Some Power, evidently, as intelligent as the power that moves the hand of the human artist when he paints that oak into his landscape. How many of us have stopped to think that not only in the world of mind but in the material world itself, all forms of power are as invisible as the fairies that work unseen in the rosebud and the little birds' egg and the big rock? ”

“ Yet Nature does it right before our eyes, and over and over and over again! Even I, old as I am, and as much as I know, I don't know how she does it, but I do know how it all started; how Nature first began to change one thing into another. It was when she began making marbles, granites, and other kinds of rock out of other kinds. That was ages before she changed little brown seeds into big trees with pink blossoms and red apples on them, or little brown cocoons into big golden butterflies, or anything like that. ”

“ If you are a bashful boy or girl you can understand how the Misses Soldanella have been able, in spite of their icy covering, to get here to greet us on this lovely May morning. You know how warm your face feels when you blush. It seems to be somewhat the same way with all flowers when they blush into bloom. The blossom becomes quite a little warmer than any other part of the plant. It is the heat of the growing buds and, still more, the heat of the blossoms that melts a passage for the Soldanellas through the ice, for they often blossom before they get above the ice at all. ”

“ One of the strangest, most poetic phases of the relation between the great blue mountains and the great blue sea is that waves, as they approach the shores of continents bordered by mountain ranges, rise higher and higher; and the higher the mountains, the higher rise the waves. These waves are not driven by wind or tide but seem drawn forward by some strange power. This power, however, is no stranger than the one that makes us fall and bump our noses when we stub our toes—the power of gravitation, according to which all masses attract each other. ”

“ But if you watch the waves carefully and study them a little you will see underlying and controlling this apparent anarchy the wonderful engineering by which the machinery of the sea works out its appointed tasks. It is when the earth has gathered its harvests and laid down to its winter rest that the sea begins gathering harvests of its own, grinding up the rocks for food for the plants in its gardens, for new clothes for its shell-fish, and new soil for earth harvests in millenniums yet to be. ”

“ And like the birds, their joyous springtime mood responds to the quick changes of sun and shade. In our own land when the sky grows cloudy, even for a short time as you may have noticed, birds stop singing. Then when the sky clears they start up again. But, up here in the Alps in the spring when the birds are singing among the mountain meadows, the glaciers, at whose feet these meadows lie, do the very same thing. ”

“ Wrinkles in the earth and in the mountainsides make the first troughs for the streamlets and the rivers, and then the running water itself digs these natural channels deeper. Many rivers begin as streamlets flowing out of springs. The great Mississippi began as a baby, just like the rest of us. You can jump across it still if you go up to its source. Springs not only start rivers in life but go on feeding them. Most large river systems get secret gifts in this way, as they flow along, from thousands of springs that empty into them or their tributaries. ”

“ We drop pebbles into the hole. They rattle down and down with long, dull echoes, dying away. We can hear the murmur of running water. Gusts of cold air come up that bite like the wind on a sharp winter day.
These underground palaces of art start as great cracks in the ice, called "crevasses," from a French word meaning a crevice. They can usually be seen plainly as yawning chasms, but sometimes are so bridged over by the snows that a small, dark hole is all you see. And we might not see that in time. This would be very bad, for these snow bridges are often quite thin. ”

“ For these glaciers do, on a smaller scale, what Mr. Labrador and his partners in northern America, Europe, and Asia did on a large scale so many centuries ago. Suppose now, like Agassiz, we trace a glacier to its source. It will be a long journey, all steep, some of it almost straight up, and along chasms of slippery ice with sudden storms that hide the chasms and blind your eyes and take away your breath. The first part of our journey is over a field of ice, gray with the dirt of weathered rock from the mountain sides. ”

“ On the northern border the Atlas Mountains, with precipices of wild beauty and ranges of bare, pink rock outlined against the blue of the morning sky; then dune waves stretching for miles and miles with valleys between them, so wide that it takes the camels from breakfast time until noon to lumber their way across. The crests of some of these dune waves go spinning off in spray with every freshening breeze. Little dunes often dissolve away in the wind as the caravan moves toward them. ”

“ There they are, the river valleys and the river beds, full of sand and gravel, and with boulders along the banks, and branch valleys running into them; a river system all complete but for one thing—water. It's just as if the main valley and the branches had been made all ready but the river never came; or as if there had been rivers there once but they couldn't stand the climate! Of course, when a cloudburst comes along it helps itself to these ready-made river-beds; but for the most part they stand as empty as the ruins on the desert's edge in which
... ”

“ Glacier made the drumlins of the stuff he brought with him, he enjoyed himself (at least let us hope so) tobogganing on hills he found ready made. These hills are real mountains; usually the granite heart of the mountain, because only a very strong rock could stand having one of these playful giants riding over him and live to tell the tale. ”

“ River water alone couldn't cut those canyons—the Grand Canyon and the rest. The Colorado and its tributaries had to have grinding tools and the tools were the pebbles they dragged over their rock-beds; and thus, in the course of ages, wore them down and down and down.
Busy, busy all the time—these rivers. But although they are always at work they not only never forget to look beautiful but they beautify everything they touch. ”

“ Waves are formed in the surface ice of the glacier because surface ice moves faster than the main mass beneath. On the bordering mountain walls the ice rises into still greater waves "foaming about the feet of the dark central crests like the surf of enormous breakers." And this great, still image of the parent sea, from which the air currents carried the moisture that made it, has eddies and whirlpools, and like the troubled sea, "whose waters cast up mire and dirt," the glacier, where it swirls along its shores, works pebbles and dirt to the surface. ”

“ What is still more interesting, the sea at the same time is emptying into the rivers; for the waters of all the lands and the waters of all the seas, are one, and what the rivers give to the sea the sea returns in the rain clouds that are blown landward by the winds. The Earth's waters are thus always in circulation like the blood in our bodies. In making this endless circuit they do an immense amount of useful and beautiful work, and have many strange and curious ways of doing it. ”

“ At that point the Minnesota River flows in the Mississippi's old valley—which is plainly too big for it—while above Fort Snelling the Mississippi is forced to squeeze its way through a stingy little gorge that used to belong to the Minnesota, and I'm sure would be plenty big enough for it now. It's like the story of a changeling baby in a fairy tale, isn't it? Only in the fairy tale the changeling always gets back to his old home, while the misplaced Mississippi in Minnesota doesn't.
But the glaciers made it up to the Mississippi, in a way, for this rude jostling. ”

“ They are the bones of the hungry landscape showing through. Then we come to bare table-lands and the empty beds of rivers and lakes that long ago went dry; valleys scattered with boulders of all sizes and in every imaginable position; and so on over into the Arabian desert, with its flats of white sand closed in by high cliffs, and vast stretches of black and red gravel. More of the sand and gravel of the desert is red than yellow ”

“ You can easily see why evolution is the most talked about of all phases of science—of the study of this wonderful world we live in. One reason is it's such an astonishing thing in itself, this relationship of all forms of life, trees, kittens, birds, and everything; another reason is that in reading the books on evolution you're taken into every field of knowledge and into the most curious and striking aspect of things in those fields. ”

“ And on all its sand, made in these various ways—by wind and rain and heat and cold, and the crystal fairies of the land of change—the desert puts its special trade-mark, just as a manufacturer puts his trade-mark on his goods. ”

“ IV. How the Snow Men, the Glaciers, and the Rocks Go Walking
Now that we have learned how glaciers, wild flowers, and butterflies get up into this high world, by climbing up here ourselves in the beautiful springtime, the next thing, I suppose, is to climb down again. But first just look over the edge here and you can get some notion of how high we are, not merely in feet and figures, as we have it in the table of mountain heights in our geography, but in actual feeling.
"What are those little blocks, all ruled off like a chessboard, away down there?" ”

“ Along the dry shore of an ancient sea when the tide was out, rain-drops fell on the sand and dust. Tides often come in with a rush, in wild waves driven by the wind, but when there is no wind and no waves rolling in from far - 245 - distant storms the tide may overspread such delicate things as the imprint of rain-drops with a thin protecting film of mud. ”

“ The soldanella grows among the thick pebble beds and the big boulders right on the edges of the glaciers. It is a member of the primrose family. It may be pink, white, or blue. The blue flowers are most common. But blue, pink, or white, these baby bells are always born twins; two sisters side by side on the same stalk, showing their dear fairy faces just above those layers of ice. They are such delicate little things you wonder how they can ever stand it. But ice, pshaw, they don't mind it at all. ”

“ The force that keeps the earth in its orbit is just as careful to catch and plant the tiny seeds of the grasses and the pine-trees drifting forward in the wind, so keeping the world clothed with life and verdure. ”

“ We know already how they learned that rivers open their own gateways through the mountains; how they know rocks are made over in the fairyland of change; how they know the ancient glaciers scattered the boulders over mountainside, valley, and field; how they know the mountains are children of the sea. ”

“ ONE PEBBLE MAY PLAY MANY PARTS
I, in my time, may have been many kinds of rock. First, heaved up out of the sea by the earliest wrinkling of - 100 - the cooling earth as granite; then weathered away into soil and carried by rivers to the sea, where I was remade the first time, maybe, as part of the "dough" in a pudding stone; then up again in an earth wrinkle and again back to sea, this time to be made into some one of the clay stones, and then back to granite again. ”

“ One of the quaintest little bits of real life in Lakeland is how the baby gulls of the Great Lakes worry their papas and mamas by going swimming before they are old enough; how their parents give them a spanking and send them back home; and how kind all the lady gulls are to the little gulls of neighbors that come to their houses to play with their children. ”

“ We see the April rains carve fairy canyons in the soft clay of the roadside or the creek, but it is hard to realize, as we stand on some pinnacle of the Alps and look out over the deep and wide valleys, the gorges, the cliffs, and mountains cut in two, that all are but the handiwork of - 68 - the rain-drops banded together as flowing waters. For a long time this was questioned by scientific men, because the idea so upset the old theory that great changes in this world of ours came about all of a sudden and from causes not at work in these days. ”

“ The Romans gave us a science of government and a solid way of doing practical things, such as the building of good roads and bridges. The great lesson of history is that civilization and human liberty and all the things that make life worth living have not only survived the fall of empires but stand to-day on higher and firmer ground than they ever did before. ”