I
High places have always held for a man a spell and a mystery. He could
not traverse the windy ways of air, the spacious trails of the birds;
but he could climb these rocky steeps, as hard-won steps toward the
billowing mountains of clouds, and the beaconing stars, and the
sky-homed mystery of mysteries. The hills were a fastness to daring
souls, yielding far vistas of shrunken valleys. They were a menace to
the low-dwellers: out of the heights fierce warriors darted, like
plunging eagles or swooping hawks, to plunder the placid wealth below.
Men were their bone-whitened victims, and their lengthened, pliable
arms.
The chill mantle of snow, the provocative veiling of clouds, rested upon
them; their streams were arteries to the valleys below, offering life to
tree and beast and man, and later an easy path to the shore and the sea.
They were size made tangible, power made visible. From their crests the
lightning flamed, the hoarse tongue of the thunder spoke. The mountain
in labor sometimes brought forth a mouse; sometimes, a rain of fiery
death to the Herculaneums cowering at its foot. Ararat and Nebo,
Popocatapetl, Pelion and Pele, Olivet and Calvary, were hills. It is no
wonder that men sought them: Mahomet in the end went to the mountain. It
was on Olympus that Jupiter held his home; it was from storming Sinai
that Jehovah thundered.
Four low hills lay side by side, near the center of a southern state.
They stretched their prone forms, like four gray and red-brown serpents,
from the piney foothills above the Black Belt to the craggy
Appalachians. Their visible bodies were parallel; but their rocky
skeletons, that jutted into water-worn summits, were not. The two outer
hills were like the top halves of the shells of a huge bivalve; their
gray structure, chipped by the persistent artisanship of time, still
indicated that they had once folded high above the two central heights.
The stony structures of the latter leant toward one another; they were
now taller and of a darker hue than their gray outposts.
It was the second hill, as you came from the east, that was called
simply "the mountain." It ran almost due north and south; its western
half was a steep and even slope, its more gradual eastern side was
toothed with countless prongs flung into sunrise lowlands, brought up
abruptly by the sandstone crags to the east. The crest of the mountain
was indented irregularly by rounded gaps or passes, like pie-crust
carelessly forked.
The rocks that broke through its summit tilted sharply to the east, just
under the surface of the mountain. Four miles nearer the sunset, beyond
Bragg Valley and Adamsville, the iron city, was the third hill, whose
rocks slanted at almost the same angle as the mountain's, but in the
opposite direction. This had once been the mountain's sunset slope.
Flanking the central heights to east and west the sandstone hills,
"Shadow Mountain," and "Sand Mountain" beyond West Adamsville, were at
once younger and older than the central ridges,--later in their
depositing, earlier in their contact with the sky.
A mountain has no memory, as men have. Outside forces may gash and
groove it, as memory is cut into the mountain's wandering sons; but
these scars have no meaning to the hill itself: they are only legible
to its more meditative children.
If the mountain had had memory, it would have been able to think back to
a period long past. Then it lay germinating beneath a slowly thickening
crust of clay and sand, under a restless sea swarming with jelly-like
bodies and strange shelled creatures. The former left no trace; the
armored creepers, dying, left their self-built monuments, to swell and
pimple the oozy wave deposits. Buried, unborn, the mountain lay for
lengthening ages.
But the skin of the earth is restless, as the inner fires waver in their
long cooling. Beneath the volatile cloak of air, and the tidal robe of
waters, the rocky layer encrusting the unknown vast core of the earth
moves in its own hour. A slow adjustment, a period of planetary
shudders, and a land is engulfed, a continent pressed upward. The thick
strata, the product of long and intermittent deposits, are buckled,
folded, and squeezed into mountain chains; huge slices of ageless
schists and gneisses are torn away and driven above the younger strata;
there is an immense crumpling and rupture. So are the hills born.
At last the time of parturition came for the mountain. Force, says Marx,
is the midwife of progress; force, a vast and burning upheaval from
below, a strained and spasmodic pressure from the molten womb of the
earth, bowed the mountain out of its deep resting place, tilted away the
early sea, arched its summit high over the surrounding lowlands. The
stress of its long birth-pangs squeezed and fused its scattered
substance into a closer, more welded body. Above it still folded its
sandy younger covering, shutting it from sun and cloaking sky.
Out of the northern lands the tilted waters came, joined by brawling
floods of melted snow and rain. Slowly, following the central crevass
cracked by the main upheaval, these wore off the mantling sandstone,
until it retreated sulkily to east and west,--bared breast-works of
grayness, bald and hoary crests whose dull whitening seemed a stooped
and withdrawn age. Down the midst of the mountain swirled the flood,
until the first widening fissure opened into a long bowl four miles
wide; and two cowering hills separated by this gradual bowl-like valley
were all that was left of its curving majesty. The stream slowed,
narrowed, became a paltry creek, noisy only in wet weather.
So was the mountain born.
Green scarfed it in the green seasons; but barer months revealed the
weathered red outcropping on its summit. Its red stain smudged the
valley, and tinted the water that carried its message to the far gulf.
The mountain did not know the red and stiffened earth-blood within its
heart, or the secret of the red stain. No more did Shadow Mountain know
the reason for its grayness. The square sandstones quarried from it and
faced to support thin wooden walls, the unconcealing glass fired out of
its materials into goblets and vases, could not tell their origin. Nor
could the rough red boulders carted away to hungry charcoal-fed
furnaces, nor the iron sows and pigs, and the tempered rails and chains
that were fashioned of its being, explain their nature, or the hard red
substance that was the mountain's heart. But at last its self-conscious
children knew the secret, and called it iron.
Redness, iron, congealed earth blood,--the name is unimportant. The
thing itself was the multiple-veined heart of the mountain, red, cold,
and waiting.