The Rock

“ So our divine Rock, once covering us, always covers us. The same yesterday, to-day and for ever! always good, always kind, always sympathetic! You often hold a sunshade over your head passing along the road or a street; but after a while your arm gets tired, and the very effort to create the shadow makes you weary. But the rock in the mountains, with fingers of everlasting stone, holds its own shadow. ”

“ No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs: all comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock; yet with such iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them,—fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted pride—unnumbered, unconquerable. ”

“ Here in the very heart of the rock, cut and worn into weird and fantastic shapes, are halls, passages, and declivities, twistings and windings, amongst which the imagination runs riot and calls up the visions of strange, elfish, unearthly forms to people the uncanny surroundings. ”

“ The rock was called 'The Place of Heaven;' there the gods first abode on earth, living many years in great rest and content, as in a happy and delicious land, though the world still lay in obscurity and darkness. ”

“ The rock is indeed hard beneath, but still disposed in thin courses of these cloven shales, so finely laid that they look in places more like a heap of crushed autumn leaves than a rock; and the first sensation is one of unmitigated surprise, as if the mountain were upheld by miracle; but surprise becomes more intelligent reverence for the great builder, when we find, in the middle of the mass of these dead leaves, a course of living rock, of quartz as white as the snow that encircles it, and harder than a bed of steel. ”

“ The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those white banks by the roadside, was born, like a poor Italian gypsy, the modern science of geology." ”

“ Others again are nothing but rock and granite from base to summit, from earth almost to heaven, and down their sides there are marked deep slides, where the rock and limestone has crumbled into an avalanche of stone and dust. The changes on their unchanging surfaces are the most beautiful. Like human nature, hard on the surface, they have hidden soft and susceptible moods. The pine-clad mountains are sunnier and more pleasing, but it is those of adamantine rock that fascinate you. ”

“ Over brown moors and mountains green the wanderer clambers, and sighs his soul to the goal that for the present stands before all others in the sky. Over the ridges he passes and surmounts the rocks and passes with light steps along the higher slopes, and then arduously battles among crag and boulder, abyss and great rock.... ”

“ Sometimes clinging with iron grasp to pinnacles of rock, he swung himself along the side of some terrific precipice, where the slightest misstep meant a rush into eternity upon the rocks a thousand feet below. ”

“ Not a single piece of coal but will whisper to the microscope the full story of that far-off scene when boughs and buds and odorous blossoms were pressed together in a single piece of shining crystal. The great stone slabs with the bird's track set into the rock picture forth for us the winged creatures of the olden time. When travelers through the Rocky Mountains behold the flaming advertisements written on the rocks, the reflection comes to all that nature also uses the rock pages for keeping her private memoranda of all those events connected with her history of fire and flood and glacier. ”

“ I daresay she knew him as well as she knew the old rock. Very old rock. The rock of ages—and the aged man—landmarks of her youth. Then the mules started walking smartly forward, with the three peasants striding alongside of them, and vanished between the trees. ”

“ The Rock itself, though somewhat dwarfed by the parent mountain when viewed from a distance, is a grand object from below, when one stands right under the great walls which form its northern buttress. ”

“ Instead of these appeared a reflection of the last and innermost nature of the man, the rock foundation, as it were, upon which was built the false and decorated superstructure that he showed to the world. ”

“ I say gazed at the “rock,” for, examine as we could, we could find no traces of the join of the sliding door; nor, indeed, could we hit upon the secret, now utterly lost, that worked it, though we tried for an hour or more. It is certainly a marvellous bit of mechanism, characteristic, in its massive and yet inscrutable simplicity, of the age which produced it; and I doubt if the world has such another to show. ”

“ How your black and white would burn! On this rock, high and lifted up, come and sit. You are panting from the long pull and the steep pull up the gorge; but you forget it all in the landscape, near and remote, that lies under your eye. ”

“ If it be proper ever to speak of respect for inanimate things, next to a great mountain, I have a profound respect for a great rock. It is the emblem of strength and power, which by its very height shelters and protects the feebleness of man. How often on the desert, under the burning sun, have I espied afar off a huge cliff rising above the plain, and urging on my wearied camel, thrown myself from it, and found the inexpressible relief of "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!" ”

“ There, in a basin of rock, it collects its scattered forces, under cover of eternal spray and cloud, and then takes another header of 434 feet to a barrier of granite, against which it rages for a mad moment, till it swells over and escapes from control by another spring of 600 feet sheer down—and now it is free, and rushes past at our feet, a joyous flashing stream. ”

“ If colossal peaks rose, naked rock, against the sky, their gloom would be overpowering. And if fiends had the making of worlds, mountains would be dreadful bulks of black porphyry, the flame-born rock, — monuments and portents of malignity. ”

“ At the south entrance, is a huge rock standing upon the narrowest foundation, and seemingly ready at any moment to topple over on the people who are constantly passing. As the incline is a little away from the road, it is to be hoped no such catastrophe will ever happen, even should the rock in ages to come be so top-heavy as to break loose from its foundations. ”

“ The broken and overhanging rocks—the loose fragments at their feet—the cascade itself, the finest in the country—the brook fretting and foaming down the rugged glen—the stunted trees, and matted foliage, which protrude from the fissures of this natural wall—the huge erect pillar of stone, which rears its detached mass above the adjoining rock—and one of the loveliest females I ever saw, attired in flowing white drapery, which, with the ribbons, fluttered and played upon the wind—could you find a subject equal to this for interest, one equal to it for sublimity and beauty? ”

“ The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountains, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop marks its sculpture in the sand or the stone. ”

“ You hear miners and quarrymen talk very truly of the live rock. That stone, they say, was cut out of the live rock, meaning the rock as it is under ground, sound and hard—as it would be, for aught we know, to the end of time, unless it was taken out of the ground, out of the place where God’s Spirit meant it to be, and brought up to the open air and the rain, in which it is not its nature to be. ”

“ Grand receding arches of different shapes, supported by gigantic pillars of rock, formed by the incessant action of the waves, which, in stormy weather, roll with terrific violence against this high rocky coast, and exhibit a strange magnificence—a wild and savage beauty, mingle with a dread repose which continues to haunt the imagination even after quitting the scene. ”

“ As you round a sand dune you come suddenly upon a gigantic round, flat-topped rock, like a titanic pink tree-stump—scarcely a reward for all those miles and miles of dreariness and intense heat, even though its flat-chopped top is a thousand feet clear above the surrounding plain. ”

“ On the right, the mass of stone, rock and boulder, rugged, broken and tumbled together, as if flung about by giants in sport, towered beyond the vision’s reach, 202 the caverns, abysses and hollows made the blacker and more impenetrable by the moonlight glinting against the protruding masses. ”

“ I am right in calling this mass of rock, which is a spur of the mountain's slope, a wall; for I look down from its top to the next inclosure far below, now overgrown and wild. What is natural and what was made by man has become so blended together, or has always been so, that I can choose to look at it as my mood may be, and feel the repose of nature or enjoy the disposing choice of art. ”

“ And, behold, as we look farther into it, it is all touched and troubled, like waves by a summer breeze; rippled, far more delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; they only undulate along their surfaces—this rock trembles through its every fibre, like the chords of an Eolian harp—like the stillest air of spring with the echoes of a child's voice. Into the heart of all those great mountains, through every tossing of their boundless crests, and deep beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering of their substance. ”

“ They are still ‘founded as the rock,’ though not so broad and general as the casing air, for the only thing that limits them is the solidity of another right, no better than my own, and, like stones in a building, or a mosaic pavement, each remains not the less firmly riveted to its place, though it cannot encroach upon the next to it. ”

“ I also had a clear view of the coast mountains for a hundred miles or thereabouts, all of which are tellingly glaciated in harmony with the above generalization. Most of the rock is granite with cleavage planes that cause it to weather rapidly into flat blocks. One conical black hill, fifteen hundred feet high, is volcanic rock, close-grained and dense like some kinds of iron ore. ”

“ The scenery too is here of the most magnificent description; rocks overhang rocks in ruinous grandeur, and appear so fearfully equipoised, that, although secure in their immensity, they create in the mind the most awful apprehension of their instability, whilst the mighty roar of the ocean beneath, unites in effect with the scenery above.—All around is sublime.——But the Geology, enough of the picturesque.
The body of the rock is composed of Slate and Granite ”

“ The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been suddenly struck into ice. ”

“ Towering up before us, with mighty bulk, is an immense rock, rising bald and rather awful into the pure sky. Near the summit its sides are completely bare, seamed by great gashes, and broken by masses of rock that look as if they might crash down at any moment. ”

“ And what was the Great Stone Face?
Off in the distance one great mountain rose far up above the others, and stood like a great giant among its fellows. By some peculiar art the rocks had been thrown together in such a way as to make the mountain look almost exactly like a human face. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in length; the nose, with its long bridge, and the great lips, which, if they could have spoken, would surely have rolled thunder from one end of the valley to the other. ”

“ Later, the shrinking and warping earth-crust lifted the rock far above the level of the sea, and it may now be found at the top of the mountain. The one bit of rock tells its story to one who inquires into its causes. ”

“ An enormous rock barred our path. One of the men stooped and seemed to push on something when, without a sound, the huge mass of rock turned on itself and disclosed a small tunnel-like opening leading into the mountain-side. ”

“ Before us lay a wide expanse of smooth stone, the top of a great rock that had its base in the woods below. Behind us rose a high wall of rock, and beyond that was the sun, now sinking towards the western horizon. ”

“ The rocks, glistening in sunshine and foam, are never wholly dry—many of them marvels of wave-sculpture and most imposing in bulk and bearing, standing boldly forward, monuments of a thousand storms, types of permanence, holding the homes and places of refuge of multitudes of seafaring animals in their keeping, yet ever wasting away. ”

“ These men had six hundred feet of sheer rock above them, and we asked how they ever got down or up again. "Oh, they're used to it; they've been at it since they were boys, and they can scale the rocks like monkeys." ”

“ The summit or peak of this ledge in the centre is called ‘The Painted Rock.’ It is so called from the fact of there being, about sixty feet below the highest peak, letters and characters painted in different colors, and evidently drawn by a tutored hand. What is most remarkable, these paintings are upon the perpendicular face of the rock, probably two hundred feet above the river, and in a place where there is no apparent possibility for mortal man to arrive. ”

“ The top-heavy and the tottering ones are almost within reach; but there are slabs of rock that look like slices out of a mountain—I had almost said like slices out of a red-hot volcano; they stand up against the blue sky and the widespreading background in brilliant and astonishing perspective. ”

“ When you stand some day on one of the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and look out over the great fields of upheaved stone, you will notice how closely the parallel ridges resemble ranks of waves making toward a shore. Like sea waves also, the vast backs of these waves of stone are long and sloping, while their fronts are comparatively short and much steeper. ”