Boulder

“ But it is the formation of the many hills of giant boulders that make these mountains so astonishing, so rugged, and so unique. You might be on the roughest sea-coast in the world, and not find scenes to surpass them in desolation and utter wildness. They are hills that appear, to the eye, as if a mighty energy underneath had, at some time, heaved and shouldered boulder upon boulder of colossal proportions into position, until large, wide-based, solid masses were raised into magnificent being. ”

“ But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth’s face. Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian days—the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. ”

“ The channel the glacier had chiselled was now full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the granite stones and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about its knees ”

“ Every now and then a boulder, that appeared firmly seated until burdened with the weight of one of them, would give way and go crashing and thundering down with great leaps behind them until lost in the forest below. ”

“ Though sand dunes rose before and round us, steep, rocky tableland, moving shingle, inaccessible heights, yet, straight before us as the arrow flies, from the tomb of the Greek priest to the heart of Osiris, we always found a mountain pass, a way up or round a boulder—a way, in fact, straight on towards the west. ”

“ From the bottom of the ravine came a constant roar of falling water, though we could spy it only now and then leaping down from one chasm to another; and more than once our guides would cry to us to stop (and that where our mules had to keep shifting their feet to get a hold) while some huge boulder, loosened by the night's rain, flew down across our path in terrific bounds from the heights above, making the very mountain tremble with the shock. ”

“ A deep cleft on a mountain-crest, a bowl-shaped hollow scooped out of a hillside, a profound ravine, a conical mound or a group of such mounds, rising conspicuously above a bare moorland, a solitary boulder of gigantic size, or a line of large boulders—these and many other prominent elements in the scenery, alike of the Lowlands and the Highlands, have arrested attention from the earliest times. ”

“ High-perched upon some lonely granite boulder, with roots writhing over the bare stone like the arms of an octopus, it sits firm and unmoved, deriding the tempest and flinging fantastic limbs into the air—emblem of tenacity in desolation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The veins stood out onto my temples, and my feet sunk into the ground, but the earth bulged and cracked all around the big rock, rivulets of dirt began to trickle down, and the big boulder groaned, give way and lurched over. ”

“ After the boulder bed, the snow, hard, crusty, firm enough to bear a horse. The "Key Hole"—and as the party passed through to the eastern slope, they found spread out beneath their feet the dry, dusty plain, with its brown coat of grass and alkali, stretching away into nothing. A venture to the edge of an immense great rock upon which one could lie down and gaze into the depth below was like looking into eternity, the contemplation of which baffles the mind for words to describe the awesome, fearful grandeur of God's handiwork as viewed from Long's Peak. ”

“ Right to the edge of a boulder, ominous, big, and black;
Plucking our hearts to our parching throats with the open track;
Then forth like a driving piston straight from its irons heath,
Till the wind stormed down on our faces, and we could not see nor breathe.
Looping, climbing, and falling, panting and swooping she sped,
Like a snake at the foot of the mountain, with her great white lamp ahead;
Shouldering the heavy gradients, heedless of breathing spells,
And racing away like a maddened steed down the sloping parallels. ”

“ But every period of life has its own playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the cliffs.
In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder,—detached, mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland,—was suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards on the tide? ”

“ Best of all I have discovered a gorge, sloping gently on one side, the other a huge boulder covered with moss; in the bottom of the gorge a brook pushing its tortuous way over rocks; and alders and ferns close to the banks. Overhead there is a rift of sky, and the sunlight flickers about [112] generously, and the woods I have come through look so dark and impenetrable. There is a fine dry rock with the alders meeting like an arbour above it, and I sit there by the hour and wonder why the forest ever made me feel over-civilised. Beside these people I feel a pure child of Nature. ”

“ It is covered with dense forests, and inhabited by the same wild things, save the red man alone, that were there thousands of years ago. It abounds in the most beautiful lakes that the sun or the stars ever shone upon. I have stood upon the immense boulder that forms the head or summit of Baldface Mountain, a lofty, isolated peak, looming thousands of feet towards the sky, and counted upwards of twenty of these beautiful lakes—sleeping in quiet beauty in their forest beds, surrounded by primeval woods, overlooked by rugged hills, and their placid waters glowing in the sunlight. ”

“ The road grows rougher and dustier as we climb upward; the boulder balustrade disappears and we find ourselves on a narrow shelf, with infrequent passing places, running along the edge of a cliff that falls almost sheer beneath us. We pause occasionally to contemplate the marvelous scene beneath. The whole floor of the valley is now visible ”

“ His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its neighbors.
A monument!
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid carefully upon flat-topped stone. ”

“ Quite clearly visible beyond the smoulder of the fire, a wintry waste of rock and snow, boulder beyond boulder, passed into a dun obscurity. The mountain to the right of them lay long and white and stiff, a shrouded death. All earth was dead and waste and nothing, and the sky alive and coldly marvellous, signalling and astir. ”

“ Up this ridge we slowly climbed for three weary hours, leaping from boulder to boulder, or dragging ourselves up their precipitous sides. The old gentleman halted frequently to rest, and showed evident signs of weariness. "It is hard; we must take it slowly," he would say (in German) whenever our impatience would get the better of our prudence. At seven o'clock we reached a point about 13,500 feet, beyond which there seemed to be nothing but the snow-covered slope, with only a few projecting rocks along the edge of a tremendous gorge which now broke upon our astonished gaze. ”

“ These wonderful boulder piles are distributed throughout all the cañons of the range, completely choking them in some of the narrower portions, and no mountaineer will be likely to forget the savage roughness of the roads they make. Even the swift, overbearing rivers, accustomed to sweep everything out of their way, are in some places bridled and held in check by them. ”

“ We are on the very brink of a deep narrow gorge, the upper part of which is so thickly clad with pines as to resemble the crest of some gigantic helmet, but beneath the naked granite stands out in all its grim barrenness, lashed by the spray of the mighty torrent that roars between its projecting rocks. Just below us, the river, forced back by a huge boulder in the centre of its course, literally piles itself up into a kind of liquid mound, foaming, flashing and trembling incessantly, the ceaseless motion and tremendous din of the rapids having an indescribably bewildering effect. ”

“ Yes, it was exactly as King Tommy of Yoolaman had described it—a great black bluff boulder, fashioned by Nature into the rude semblance of a human head, the back part of which, being somewhat corrugated and affording a deposit ground for drift and windblown particles, had become overgrown with grey hanging lichen that in the distance gave the appearance of an old man's hair. ”

“ In their decay they are laying new foundations. Grain torn from grain of solid rock, boulder from boulder is swept away; layer after layer of grains or boulder is laid—‘well and truly laid’; rock system piled upon rock system; till the time comes, and all this is upheaved into a chain of peaks which, though their every particle were taken from the substance of that older chain, will be like it in being a mountain range, but in that alone. So they have their being, in a different and vaster cycle than man’s, their life only another fragment of that change which is the single fixed reality. ”

“ From the roots of the farther bushes the hillside dropped precipitously. He worked his way along until, by a cleft in the rocks, an opening offered itself.
Here, stooping low and bending aside the alders, he could creep out upon a big, flat, moss-grown boulder, which overhung the ravine like a balcony. He had not thought he was so high up. The other side of the gulf spread out before him could not be seen for the smoke—but the tops of tall pines growing on its bottom were far below him. ”

“ At noon, I lay for a long time upon a flat boulder under the tall oaks of the western bluff, looking down upon the lower woods, now in tender new leaf and most exquisitely colored. There are few fairer sights than a wooded mountain side seen from above; only one must not be too far above, and the forest should be mainly deciduous. ”

“ A great boulder, losing its balance, rolled from the crest above, and, loosening a great quantity of stones, mud, and sand, came rolling down near where we stood, making a fearful uproar. At the same moment the tall cliff above us let loose some immense fragments, which, bursting in pieces like bomb-shells, bounded down the steep slope at its base; and the two avalanches, meeting in the gorge, changed their direction, and went crashing down to the valley at a fearful rate, directly over the track which we had pursued in coming up. ”

“ Then such an immense boulder resting upon another boulder and bearing upon its summit a thrifty pine tree, was certainly a wonder. And they all thought so too, when in the afternoon they were climbing the rough ladder (manufactured by two Manchester gentlemen for the purpose) to obtain the views over all the trees of the town, and islands, with the ocean winding in and out. They found it hard to believe that such boulders found in thick woods could have been borne hither in ages gone by, by the force of the waters of the sea. ”

“ He looks over the boulder. Nothing in sight but boulders, lava, cacti, sand and gaete grass. “They are there, though.” He almost laughs in sarcasm as he catches himself scanning the horizon to see if any relief were in sight. Relief? For days he and the man that laid dead there had traveled without finding a trail made by a shod horse—without finding a trail of any kind. How childish to expect any help. Better brace up and die like a man. ”

“ Long before he showed up I had collected a number of large rocks and cemented them into one large boulder. The boulder itself was poised on the edge of the summit. Around its middle I had deposited a ring of iron, grooved to fit a rail of the same mineral. This rail led from the boulder to a point halfway down the slope. Thus, when the mobile had reached that ridge of iron and was following it up the slope, I removed with my tentacles the little rocks that kept the boulder from toppling over the edge of the summit. ”

“ Two hours earlier they had climbed down from above, making use of the scant moonlight or clinging like limpets to the cliff when the clouds blotted out the moon’s faint radiance: glad to arrive at their destination with nothing worse than bruises and torn clothes.
Once on the rock, they had set about their preparations: crawling all over it, making sure of knowing every inch in the dark, and becoming acquainted with each boulder that lay upon its surface. They tested them with their crowbars in the darkness, and found it possible to move all but two or three. ”

“ Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite boulder, as large as a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently, and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. ”