Souterrain

“ In some tales it is a fairy man who makes the request. If it is refused, punishment follows in sickness among the cattle; if complied with, the cows flourish and give an extra supply of milk. In one instance the "wee folk" provided money to pay a mason to build the new cowhouse. We may smile, and ask how the position of the cowhouse could affect the homes of the fairies; but if these small people lived in the souterrains, as tradition alleges, we may even at the present day find these artificial caves under inhabited houses. ”

“ We must-not conceive of piles of bowlders or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it; cathedral-shaped buttes towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that can not be scaled, and cañon walls that shrink the river into insignificance; with vast hollow domes, and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead. ”

“ But on the land, no sooner have the subterranean forces upheaved a mountain, a plateau, a continent, or an island, than the processes of subaërial erosion begin to contend against it. Rains, frost and heat, chemical change, subdue the most enduring and solid rock formations, dividing them with fractures, and pulverizing their masses and fragments to sand and clay, which gravitation by the vehicle of running water carries down and away to the sea, there to find rest until another uplift shall renew the cycle of changes. ”

“ Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, has Mother Nature accomplished her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and at length an outburst of organic life, a milky way of snowy petals and wings, girdling the rugged mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees, as sea-waves break and bloom on a rock shore. ”

“ And as they came near land, they looked in wonder at mighty masses of rock and soil that threw their shaggy heads high above the surrounding terrain, huge masses that rose high, like waves in the water, till they towered in [Pg. 158] solemn grandeur miles into the air! What a sight for these men of a world so old that age long erosion had washed away the last traces of hills, and filled in all of the valleys! ”

“ They look and act like those hills of the desert, the sand dunes, and they record the drift of wind-whipped sand across a naked land, before the river had established a floodplain within its present confines. ”

“ It happens, too, when some prodigious bulk Of age-worn soil is rolled from mountain slopes Into tremendous pools of water dark, That the reeling land itself is rocked about By the water's undulations; as a basin Sometimes won't come to rest until the fluid Within it ceases to be rocked about In random undulations. And besides, When subterranean winds, up-gathered there In the hollow deeps, bulk forward from one spot, And press with the big urge of mighty powers Against the lofty grottos, then the earth Bulks to that quarter whither push amain The headlong winds. ”

“ Wild and desolate, the rock walls, which round themselves off to bald peaks, rise on both sides, and have their golden tops covered with coal-black stones, burnt, as it were, by the sun. The peculiarly solemn and dull character of this region always struck me the most when I rode after sunset over the unmeasureable rock rubbish which covers the earth to a great height, and is only interrupted by broad water-streams, which have formed themselves in the course of thousands of years, by the unfrequent, though not unknown storms, as experience has shown. ”

“ We walk on pathways of fine sand, strewn with these little brown needles which drop from the cedars. Always in terraces, they are bordered with balustrades and pillars of granite covered with the most delicious moss; you would say all the hand-rails have been garnished with a beautiful green velvet, and at each side of the sanded pathway invariably flow little fresh and limpid brooks, which join their crystal notes to those of the distant torrents and cascades. ”

“ During the wet season a single rain may fill the gorges, sheet the mountain slopes with water, tear great trees from their hold, break off mighty rock fragments and carry them onward, like wooden blocks, with hundreds of tons of finer gravel. ”

“ Beneath the purest sky the most treacherous soil; ruins of inconceivable opulence, oppressive, and saddening; boiling waters, clefts exhaling sulphur, rocks of slag defying vegetable life, bare forbidding tracts, and then at last on all sides the most luxuriant vegetation seizing every spot and cranny possible, running over every lifeless object, edging the lakes and brooks, and nourishing a glorious wood of oak on the brink of an ancient crater! ”

“ The waves of the Sound have eroded the shores into steep and often precipitous bluffs of gravel, sometimes rising a hundred feet above the water, where narrow beaches, strewn with boulders, border them. ”

“ Imagine a chasm that at times is less than a quarter of a mile wide and more than a mile deep, the bed of which is a tossing, roaring, madly impetuous flood; winding its way in a sinuous course along walls that are painted with all the pigments known to nature! What an imposing spectacle; what a scene of awesome grandeur; what a sublime vision of mightiness! But the geologist sees in the crags and precipices, the strata and bed of that brawling stream, the handwriting of nature, the easily decipherable physical history and geology of the land. ”

“ Their undulations become more frequent and steeper, until, entering within the mountain-region, we find the rocks curved, crumpled, fractured, inverted, tossed over each other into yawning gulf and towering crest, like billows arrested at the height of a furious storm. ”

“ Rocky crevasses and gorges cut more or less deeply into the mountain range, and up to its ridge extends the desert, destructive of all life, with sand and stones, with rocky cliffs and reef-like, desert hills. ”

“ But the carving of the canons and mountains is insignificant, when compared with the denudation of the whole area, as evidenced in the cliffs of erosion. Beds hundreds of feet in thickness and hundreds of thousands of square miles in extent, beds of granite and beds of schist, beds of marble and beds of sandstone, crumbling shales and adamantine lavas, have slowly yielded to the silent and unseen powers of the air, and crumbled into dust and been washed away by the rains and carried into the sea by the rivers. ”

“ Ugly gravel heaps, staring mounds of 'pipe-clay,' deposits of sludge, a surface filled with holes, broken windlasses, the wrecks of whims, all combine to make a hideous picture as they stand revealed in the pitiless sunshine. ”

“ 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 materials worn from the surface of the higher are spread out over the lower grounds. The streams as they descend begin to drop their freight of sediment when, by the lessening of their declivity, their carrying power is diminished. The great plains of the earth’s surface are due to this deposit of gravel, sand and loam. They are thus monuments at once of the destructive and reproductive processes which have been in progress unceasingly since the first land rose above the sea and the first shower of rain fell. ”

“ Across many a busy stream, from meadow to meadow, lies your flowery way; mountains all about you, few of them hidden by irregular foregrounds. Gradually ascending, other mountains come in sight, peak rising above peak with their snow and ice in endless variety of grouping and sculpture. Now your attention is turned to the moraines, sweeping in beautiful curves from the hollows and cañons, now to the granite waves and pavements rising here and there above the heathy sod, polished a thousand years ago and still shining. ”

“ It is evident that the sedimentary rocks of all ages have been derived from the degradation of land. The gravel, sand, and mud, of which they consist, existed previously as part of mountains, hills, or plains. ”

“ But in place of sharp-rimmed escarpments, and tors, and broken shattered ridges, we see everywhere a rounded and smoothly-flowing configuration which prevails up to a height of 1600 feet or thereabout, above which the rocks take on the rugged appearance which is natural to them. By what magic have the strata at the lower levels escaped in such large measure from the action of rain and frost, which have furrowed and shattered the higher mountain-tops? ”

“ Thus storm waves little by little pry and suck the rock loose, and in this way, and by the blows which they strike with the stones of the beach, they quarry out about a joint, or wherever the rock may be weak, a recess known as a SEA CAVE, provided that the rock above is coherent enough to form a roof. ”

“ These "fallen angels" may be the representatives of the spirits whom the pagan Irish worshipped and strove to propitiate, and some of the tales relating to the fairies may have their origin in the mythology of a primitive people. But the raths and souterrains are certainly the work of human hands, and I would suggest that in the legends connected with them we have a reminiscence of a dwarf race who rode on ponies, were good musicians, could spin and weave, and grind corn. ”

“ Its associations are the storm, the cloud, the wild sea, the desolate waste, the uninhabited coast. The blocks of granite are hideous and enormous—everywhere perpendicular wall—the severe inhospitality of the abyss. ”

“ A mountain which has long been silent, and on whose slopes the cultivation has spread for ages, is yet the centre of great subterranean disturbance, shaken by earthquakes, and surrounded by hot springs and sulphureous exhalations. ”

“ The sedimentary rocks are built from the disintegrated wreckage of older ones. The products of rock decay are picked up and dragged, or carried in suspension or solution, by wind, running water, or moving ice. ”

“ Every hard rain dissolves, erodes, and uncovers the sides of this mountain as if it were composed of sugar, paste, and stones. It is made up of a confused mingling of parts and masses of soluble and flinty materials. Here change and erosion run riot after every rain. There is a great falling to [Pg 229] pieces; gravity, the insatiable, is temporarily satisfied, and the gulches feast on earthy materials, while the river-channel is glutted with crushed cliffs, acres of earth, and the débris of ruined forests. ”

“ Though water, aided by time, is probably the chief excavating power, there can be no doubt that the action of subterranean fire has likewise produced, and still produces, many hollows in the hard crust of the earth. ”

“ It is an ancient sea bottom. The lower strata is clay and the one above it is sand. They are wild and rugged beyond description. The action of the air, wind and storm have worn them into towers, citadels and fantastic peaks. ”

“ So, our hillsides and mountain-slopes, where the forests are most usually found, are the world's great roofs or water-sheds, from which, if they are thatched with trees, the water flows off slowly and in the most desirable manner into the streams and upon the lands of the regions below, but, if stripped of this protecting covering, then with sudden and disastrous flood which no art of man can withstand. ”

“ As the streams that flow on the surface of the earth are constantly altering their courses, thus also the subterranean waters are ever active in excavating new channels in the bosom of the rock. Finding at length new outlets on a lower level, they abandon their ancient beds, and the explorer now wanders dry-footed where once a foaming river gushed along. ”

“ The higher mountains suffer their summits to be broken into fragments, and to be cast down in sheets of massy rock, full, as we shall see presently, of every substance necessary for the nourishment of plants; these fallen fragments are again broken by frost, and ground by torrents, into various conditions of sand and clay—materials which are distributed perpetually by the streams farther and farther from the mountain's base. Every shower that swells the rivulet enables their waters to carry certain portions of earth into new positions, and exposes new banks of ground to be mined in their turn. ”

“ Buckland, an opinion which was concurred in by Greenough, Conybeare, and other able writers of their time, that the general dispersion of gravel, sand, and loam, over hills and elevated plains, as well as valleys, was the result of a universal deluge, which is described as transient, simultaneous, and of a date not very remote; that the existing system of valleys was mainly due to the same cause, and that thus both valleys and gravels preceded our present river systems. ”

“ It is high water to-day. With a great hissing and roaring the waters shoot down the declivity, then sink down into their foaming grave with dull, plaintive rumblings, while the glistening spray breaks over them in one high-vaulted arch. ”

“ The reader must not suppose, when I describe these walls, formed of the débris of the glacier, as consisting of boulders, stones, pebbles, sand, and gravel, a rough accumulation of loose materials indiscriminately thrown together, that we find the ancient moraines presenting any such appearance. Time, which mellows and softens all the wrecks of the past, has clothed them with turf, grassed them over, planted them with trees, sown his seed and gathered in his harvests upon them, until at last they make a part of the undulating surface of the country. ”