*Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_.
When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first
launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long
before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the
cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot
down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column
broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it,
but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.
So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge
with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at
Santa Cruz, California.
There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a
thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the
rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small
boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower
places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those
roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great
perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies
from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the
wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a
thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this
resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with
rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with
thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the
rocks we will try to relate.
[Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of
that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of
roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative
processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not
seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one
hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point,
feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at
some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm
weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of
spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the
nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have
fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it
away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and
figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra,
Tantalus, represented here.
This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds
the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the
ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific,
that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.
Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was
moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.
As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the
sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a
power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length
of work like his eternity.
The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular
order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces
they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled
together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1)
igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the
ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3)
limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard;
(4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having
huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around
which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6)
conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold
snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of
organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or
strata, may be distinguished.
[Illustration: The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place
less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half
a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years
go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave
results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet
with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a
drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the
reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be
driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore. At each
inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks
outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack
in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from
the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to
seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning
carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.
No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great
excavation one hundred feet back from the shore. It is one hundred and
fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the
material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the
natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York,
might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch
a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through
the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness
the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the
arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be
carried out to sea like many another.
[Illustration: A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves
wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers
reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is
immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the
cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the
pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may
sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin
falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught
and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of
bones within him.
In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as
the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand
times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the
projecting finger. It is often done. Illustration No. 4 shows at low
tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the
bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the
pier stands lonely in the sea.
[Illustration: An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial
nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with
anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could
show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer
yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a
point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell
of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle.
[Illustration: A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long
projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully
seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky
vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have
mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little
specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks
that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of
the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of
the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from
Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that
they may drink.
[Illustration: A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is
still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier,
scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel
to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore. The
one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and
carries away arch and shore alike. At some points a careful and even
admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless
tooth gnaws on unceasingly.
[Illustration: Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]
On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in
many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at
the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and
carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of
skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience
there that did not result quite so disastrously.
The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut
through the rocky barrier of the shore. But in this case the trend of
the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke
into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two
entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland. It
terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which
are not shown in the picture.
[Illustration: Arch Remains Side Wall Broken, Santa Clara, Cal.]
What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured
over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle
undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never
blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer
air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day.
There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales
of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights,
as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may
read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that
coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it
shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."