Rock art

“ Now, as soon as you have obtained the power of drawing, I do not say a mountain, but even a stone, accurately, every question of this kind will become to you at once attractive and definite; you will find that in the grain, the lustre, and the cleavage-lines of the smallest fragment of rock, there are recorded forces of every order and magnitude, from those which raise a continent by one volcanic effort, to those which at every instant are polishing the apparently complete crystal in its nest, and conducting the apparently motionless metal in its vein ”

“ It looks as though the hewers of stone had roughed out of the rock a rudimentary statue, like a snow man, which the artist never completed. On the next page he goes on to describe the search for rock sculptures which his party conducted in the grottoes surrounding the city, where they had the good fortune to discover a group some miles to the north. On page 193 we find the statement:
Our unexpected discovery, that of rock sculpture of great antiquity and pertaining to a vanished art, filled us with delight, for it revealed a past which was practically unknown. ”

“ Rocking-stones.—Just on the borderland between the works of Nature and Art comes the so-called Rocking-stone, or Logan-stone, which is usually nothing more than an ice-transported boulder, poised so nicely on its rocky bed that gentle pressure by the hand may cause it to rock, or oscillate. ”

“ Giant rocks, the work of the great sculptor Nature, lie in folded ridges, their stony draperies falling about them in massive magnificence that is beyond the reach of art. Rivulets of living water trickle down their gaping sides, and gather, and swell, and flow through darkened chasms half hidden from the light of the sun, playing an everlasting game of hide and seek, then rushing forth sparkling and laughing in its light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are places which only the feet of intrepid and ardent lovers of nature have ever trodden, or, what is still better, ever will, and pinnacles of sharpened rock from the all but unattainable points of which myriads of others like them, yet each utterly different, stretch away in an endless forest of white granite spires among which sunshine and rain and the often swirling mists make new beauties each more beautiful than the last. ”

“ For countless ages, frost and snow, heat and vapor, lightning and rain, torrent and glacier, have wrought upon that mysterious rock, evolving from its iron, its sulphur, its arsenic, its lime and its lava, the glorious apparel in which it stands arrayed. And the wondrous fabrication is still going on. The bewildered traveler would scarcely be surprised to see the gorgeous spectacle fade from his vision like a dream: but its texture is continually being renewed; the giant forces are ever at work ”

“ When a rock of any kind has lain for some time exposed to the weather, Nature finishes it in her own way. First she takes wonderful pains about its forms, sculpturing it into exquisite variety of dent and dimple, and rounding or hollowing it into contours which for fineness no human hand can follow; then she colours it; and every one of her touches of colour, instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is a minute forest of living trees, glorious in strength and beauty, and concealing wonders of structure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor can I imagine any person thoughtfully regarding the more distant range, without feeling his curiosity strongly excited as to the method of its first sculpture. That long banks and fields of rock should be raised aslope, and break at their edges into cliffs, however mysterious the details of the operation may be, is yet conceivable in the main circumstances without any great effort of imagination. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light and song, shouting color hallelujahs.
As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing rocks, their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as they stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the cañon like a sea. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Farther up the cañon the rocks do not rise to so great heights, and the vista opens out into pleasant winding valleys well covered with grass, but there are several very interesting points where the action of internal convulsions upon the granite and syenite in elder ages, when they came hot from the crucible of nature, have rolled and twisted and kneaded the great rock-masses into most curious and notable shapes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His words on mountain sculpture, with an illustration from the Aiguilles or needle-pointed Alpine peaks, too long for full quotation, may well be cited. 'Nature gives us in these mountains a clear demonstration of her will. She is here driven to make fracture the law of being. She cannot tuft the rock-edges with moss, or round them by water, or hide them with leaves and roots. She is bound to produce a form, admirable to human beings, by continual breaking away of substances. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The united and increasing action of the winds and waves has worn the hard granite rock into the most fantastic forms, and from certain points of view it is not difficult to invest some of these masses of stone with a fancied resemblance to the human form. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I said, starting up, as a sudden ray of light arrived at that moment through a crevice in the roof, and lighted up a small portion of the rock, bare of vegetation, "this very rock is marble, white enough and delicate enough for any statue, even if destined to become an ideal woman in the arms of the sculptor." ”

“ The immovable rocks which bound our shores, the mountain which rears its lofty head above the clouds, the magnificent cathedral, the very triumph of art, and the beautiful statue in bronze or marble, are all acted on destructively by the sunbeam, and would soon perish beneath its irresistible energy, but for the beautiful provision made for their restoration during the darkness of night—the repose of darkness being no less essential to inorganic, than it is to animated nature. ”

“ As if the sculptor were to have but half the shaping of his work, and the block of marble almost of itself disclose its hidden Oenus, or turn a Hercules planned into a Hylas accomplished, so the rock masses contain within themselves no infinite possibility of forms—there is, to start with, a quality of mountain concealed in the rock, so that the aerial sculptors may work as they please, and never find a Dent du Midi in the Mont Blanc range, or fashion a Weisshorn from the Dolomites. ”

“ We may, if we choose, put together centaur monsters; but they must still be half man, half horse; they cannot be both man and horse, nor either man or horse. And so, if landscape painters choose, they may give us rocks which shall be half granite and half slate; but they cannot give us rocks which shall be either granite or slate, nor which shall be both granite and slate. Every attempt to produce that which shall be any rock, ends in the production of that which is no rock. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A great deal more may, however, be done than any artist has done yet, in painting the gradual disappearance and lovely coloring of stones seen through clear and calm water.
Students living in towns may make great progress in rock-drawing by frequently and faithfully drawing broken edges of common roofing slates, of their real size. ”

“ These points, however, I must reserve for illustration in my lectures on architecture. To-day, I shall limit myself to the illustration of elementary sculptural structure in the best material;—that is to say, in crystalline marble, neither soft enough to encourage the caprice of the workman, nor hard enough to resist his will.
159. C. By the true "Providence" of Nature, the rock which is thus submissive has been in some places stained with the fairest colours, and in others blanched into the fairest absence of colour, that can be found to give harmony to inlaying, or dignity to form. ”

“ All these rock folds which, with the help of the sculpturing of the elements, produce the infinite variety of beauty in mountain scenery are, speaking generally, repeated in the lines of the marble. But they are repeated only in miniature, because the rocks deep in the earth are under such pressure that while the rocks on the surface are free to rise in big and comparatively simple waves those beneath are doubled up into smaller and much more crumpled folds. ”

“ That rock is accessible by but a single foot-track, and it is gashed and riven by grim chasms, yet withal great oaks and beech-trees flourish atop among the boulders, and there are drifts of fragrant wild flowers, and legions of birds and other wild creatures dwell there; and the lights and colours of heaven play about the rock, and the winds of heaven visit it with wholesome air. ”

“ Yet, with all their differences, the shapes rocks take—sandstone compared with granite, for example—are so characteristic that one soon learns to tell a long way off what kind of rock a distant landscape is made of. ”