THE PLACE.
It was a region of splendid contrasts. A continental zone which
presented in the wide range of its mere longitudinal extent a
succession of physical features that were opposite and embraced a
variety of climate, that by reason of meteorological diversity had
carved and dressed those physical features into a series of natural
wonders.
Far to the north rose a group of mountain peaks, so arranged that
they appeared like successive steps of ascent to the swelling dome,
central and dominant, over its gathered satellites, each of which
was marvellous alone, but in this association seemed forgotten or
remembered only as it increased by contrast the majesty of the great
mountain mass it attended.
This superb elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms, whose
rocky sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow filled gorges
they defined, while surmounting them all a keen shaft of granite,
roseate in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils
of mist, climbed steeply to the clouds.
The crowded and crushed snow masses, nevé-like emerged upon all the
lower shoulders of the huge crest in glacial fields of ice. Here their
Arctic currents, sweeping around the lower summits, were reinforced
by new accessions, springing from these lesser altitudes, which in
confusion poured upon them, and by many avenues of obstruction and
accidents of interference, repulse and rupture, converted the great
multiplied ice zone, encircling the whole congery of peaks, and
plunging outward over vertical escarpments to lower levels, into a
stupendous spectacle of chaos. Icebergs crossed their pinnacles in the
descent, the riven ice stream ejected blocks of ice hundreds of feet
in length, and the split glacier, seamed by colossal cleavages to the
abysses of its rocky floor, displayed its green depths. Detonations
rose upon the air, caught by the waiting winds and drifted southward
over the wild plains, the long indented coast and the far interior
canons; south to forest lands and waving grass savannahs, while near at
hand its rough roar startled the sleeping mastodon and brought terror
to men.
From this glory, which in the Sun of that strange day shone like
a titanic crown of jewels, the land areas fell suddenly away, and
expanded southward into a long sea margin on the west, and arid and
rocky wildernesses on the east, where deep canyons with vertical walls,
a thousand feet high, held in their dark bosoms the frigid waters from
the northern glaciers. An intermediate region, between the palisaded
or tenuous coast-line and these mysterious untenanted rents and time,
wind and water worn ravines, revealed scenes more mild and radiant,
wherein the apparel of nature was more colored, and where she bore
those features of appropriate beauty where river and lake, forest land
and flowered field unite in their abundance to appeal to the hearts of
men.
This hospitable land was varied. It slowly liberated itself, like an
escaping captive, from the desolation of the East, where the plains
were broken with chilled lava beds, jagged peaks, asperities of
stone, standing like geologic spectres, canyons holding emprisoned
and viewless rivers, wide and gloomy lakes around whose margins the
struggling relics of an extinct flora seemed slowly confessing their
defeat before phases of climate less lenient than their predecessors.
It freed itself from broad depressions, the beds of ancient lakes swept
by freezing winds from the northern ice country, and bare and empty,
exposing to the sky their orb-like circumference, ghastly with white
alkaline encrustation, like the pallid optic of a great leviathan,
whitened with the films of decomposition.
From all this area, rigid with the articulate expression of Death, a
land to the West began its fertile margins, tentatively uttering a new
design, with grass grown hills, low vegetation, and modest, scarcely
obvious brooks, loosening themselves in placid currents from the
highlands. Then, as if it felt the assurance of an improving destiny,
woods rose over ranges of increasing altitude, rivers swept in circling
glory through narrow and alluvial valleys, and groves of great trees
clustered over mountain terraces, defiled in green seas of leafy glory
to the lowlands, where the rhythm of verdurous beauty was resumed in
more open country, the reincarnated spirit of Nature loosened its power
upon a coast line, washed by the restless ocean.
The coast was strangely beautiful. Wide coves paved with argent or
golden sands opened the straight lines of its rocky and lofty shores
with broad emarginations. These inviting bays, defended by crowning
capes or jutting and attenuated peninsulas of dethroned basaltic
columns, formed peaceful harbors wherein the fleeing surges of the
sea often came to rest in limpid pulsations; or else, with diminished
power, but greater speed and imposing crescent beauty, rolled upon
them in avalanches of spray. The land came down to these charming
regions in undulating surfaces, sometimes deeply wooded, though
often more artificially indented with scattered or solitary trees.
Not infrequently it accompanied, in its descent, the devious flow of
rivers, expanding into estuaries of such proportions that the fleet of
a modern nation might have floated safely within their borders.
The smaller coves furnished a more minute and exquisite interest. Here
partially degraded escarpments of stone walled them in with steep
ascents of talus, over which ambitious vegetation, almost baffled in
its encounter with sea fogs and saline breezes, produced an irregular
covering of green, and displayed the ample ingenuity of its struggle.
This ingenuity was shown in the twisted roots of trees holding, like
closed fists enwrapped boulders, by roots penetrating at obtuse
angles the split surfaces of the palisades, or, entangled in a knot
of mutually helpful buttresses, suspending some adventurous pine at
a sharp angle above the splashing and murmurous tides below it. The
dazzlingly clear water in these darkened and umbrageous coves, revealed
with every shaft of light, the broad fronds of algae, floating like
aprons in green sheets, rising upon dark stem-like roots from the
cold waters. Here, upon the sides of detached masses of rock, sported
companies of sea lions, their gleaming and undulated flanks formed for
an instant into motionless groups of beauty, to be dissolved the next
moment in revels of wreathed confusion. Far out beyond the shore, domes
of rock, just covered by each swelling wave, broke the surface with
areas of foam, and again beyond these stood, as the last vestige of the
eroded coast frontier, some needle of stone, in whose fugitive and
vanishing shadows sea-gulls rested, that again, by a sudden access of
volition, swept over it in clouds of ascending and descending plumes.
The coast-line was itself the index of a varied origin. For miles the
palisades of dark or frowning trap dikes rose precipitously above the
tide, their columnar formation yielding only a stubborn concession to
the incessant labors of air and ocean, though the scenic marvel of
cathedral spires and excavated reverberating sea caves, left by their
retreat, excused the tardy surrender to decay.
Wherever the sedimentary strata of slate or limestone, frequently but
half consolidated, and therefore more easily attacked, formed the land
surfaces, the country descended gently to the sea, and swept backward
with dissected features to the coast ranges, gleaming distantly.
Through these tracts the beds of rivers were formed, and their
currents, under two contrasted phases, appeared upon the coast-line.
They either flowed through degraded valleys, slowly expanding into the
broad estuarine coves mentioned before, or, unable to reach the easily
attacked mineral beds, and forced to flow outward upon the surface of
dense igneous rocks, leaped into the sea by cascades walled in somber
gorges, or broke with sudden splendor over precipices of unchanged
basalt.
In that pleistocene day the region, now summoned before the eye by
the familiar process of adaptive reconstruction, shrunk far northward
into low lying and frigid plains, narrowly escaping, by their slight
differential elevation, submergence from the western ocean. In this
uninviting northland, which lay like a neck of transition between the
ice mountains and their glacial precincts still farther north, and the
southern country, scattered forests of scrub willow, beech and spruces,
alternated with sand flats, cold bogs, and cairn-like moraines of stone
and gravel. The latter, swept by ice winds, drenched in snow and rains,
darkened by thunder clouds or lit by momentary blazes of the sun, held
the resistant remnants of the ice sheet, as tottering and stranded
fractions perched upon their harsh shoulders. They exposed gulches,
radiating from their summits, each occupied by momentary torrents of
water, from the melting ice cap, which, often collecting in lower
basins, formed extended semi-glacial lakes, hesitatingly bordered by a
thin growth of herbs, and in sections connected by narrow straits into
chains of untenanted and gloomy pools.
Through the monotony of this wilderness wandered herds of the mastodon,
and here on the edges of the frosted lakes stood the primeval elephant,
the mammoth of those swiftly receding days now scarcely penetrated by
the vision of science and imagination.
These faunal restorations were yet further extended. To the east of
this inhospitable and terrible zone, in cold and almost treeless
sections scarred by ravine and canon, and trending upward into the
abyssal recesses of the mountains, the cave bear secured an abiding
home.
South over the edges of that sweeter land in which the crowded life of
plants and animals, evicted from its northern habitat by the exactions
of the cold, now strained its activity and device to maintain a
simultaneous existence, in this prolific country, the pleistocene horse
ranged in thronging bands. He scarcely impinged on the high terrains
where the sabre-toothed tiger dwelt, but by preference traversed the
grassy campus, following the streams, where their widened valleys,
recently formed, were uninvaded by the forests, and sometimes forced an
inquisitive path over the high country to the margins of the ocean.
A meteorological complexity reflected and rivalled all of these
contrasts of position and occupation, and from within the sealed
envelope of the earth’s crust, also, movements and voices responded
to the ceaseless alternations of heat and cold, tempest and silence,
serene and raging hours.
The warm southern winds sweeping from the broad Carribean Continent,
gathering moisture from the wide gulf of the Mississippi, reached
these more northern regions dense with saturation, and were suddenly
chilled by rarefaction as they were lifted into higher elevations
by the low lying flood of cold air, pouring in from the glaciated
poles. The contact zone between these displaced masses of hot and
moisture-laden air, and the underlying frosted and more slowly drifting
atmosphere precipitated a meteorological violence, an exorbitant vigor
of meteorological phenomena. Then ensued the tumult of storm and
electrical perturbation.
The rivers rose upon their banks, the sinister and blackened skies
emptied their bosoms of their watery contents, avalanches rolled down
the mountain sides, the air smitten with a thousand forks of lightning
vibrated with the internal electric charges that evoked all the echoes
of canyon, peak and plain. Cyclonic winds tore through the forests and
bent the crowded heads of the trees. Then the marshalled clouds fled
in torrents of rain or were dissipated in the dazzling warfare, and
then turquoise skies bent over the washed lands, a summer sun opened
the petals of innumerable flowers, the cool air scarcely lifted from
the ground the scent of its warm palpitations, and, to the detonations
of the storm, succeeded the still unpacified but vanishing roar of the
overladen streams.
In winter the petrifying touch of cold descended from the margins of
the glaciers, and the denuded trees, the snow blankets of the higher
land, the stilled streams and the pale skies imparted a sepulchral
stare to the shrunk soil that turned its dead face upward to its leaden
dome.
To the excitement and changes of external nature the unadjusted
equilibria of the interior of the earth contributed new and dangerous
surprises--earthquakes threw down the cliffs into foaming rivers,
shook loose from their prehensile bases the towering pines upon the
hillsides, or started in repetition the sundered strata from the
mountains, and changed the face of nature with scarred exposures and
inundated valleys. The earth opened along shivering seams, and the
exuded lava rising from centres of stupendous pressure poured out in
belts its half consolidated magmas.
Volcanic vents broke their seals and the uprushing tides of gas and
steam and cinders turned the day to night, and signalized the distant
craters with voluminous wreathes and columns and ash-filled whirlwinds;
sometimes in a fierce intoxication of chaotic incident, emptying upon
surrounding snowfields their hot and scorching rains.
Thus nature wore all the wardrobe of her almost exhaustless store,
displayed all the properties of her acquisitions through ages of
geological change, and assembled the most startling devices for
awakening attention and vitalizing motion.
She seemed at this point on the earth’s surface so to arrange and
direct her vast physical resources for rousing the mind, charging the
heart, and stiffening the will, that the new being, arising from
its cradle, and beginning the task of occupying the world, might be
suddenly endowed with mind and heart and will, so vigorously organized,
as to make that conquest easy.
Amidst these wide contrasts of climate and scene, of internal and
external energy, of products and denizens, lived a race of prehistoric
men and women thinly scattered in villages over the shoulders, the
valleys and the alluvial terraces of the Sierra Nevadas in Central
California, at a point where a broad ingress of the sea swept past
the degraded and depressed Coast Ranges. Here, from the startling and
multiplied expressions of nature, the full influence of environment
encompassed at an impressionable instant the dawning powers, the
pulses of its primal heat, the mental movements, the suddenly erected
passions of this Glacial and Occidental Man, this strange and almost
silent creature, appearing from the unknown, and moving forward on the
listless feet of the centuries towards the powers and civilization of
the orient.
Broadly reviewed, we have for the stage of this prehistoric drama, its
pictures and stirring scenes of adventure and haphazard perils, the
arctic glacial zone, the canyon country on the East, the Fair Land on
the West and South, and beyond the unchanging ocean, as primal then as
when it swept its fluctuating waves over Archaean ledges.
The particular place where our eyes discover, in this vast area, the
movements of men, was situated in a grove of giant trees upon an upland
that formed a terrace on the sides of a mountain range almost wooded to
its summit, where the dwindling vegetation exposed the naked precipices
of an abrupt and overhanging crest. In front of the upland the ground
slipped suddenly down in slanting and again vertical faces of rock and
soil to a sort of bottom land, a long elliptical depression holding
at its lower end a basin of water, which, as it indicated no visible
source of supply, must have been fed from the streams formed in the
heavy rain-falls, or from the springs issuing over its hidden floor.
The land rose in a low swell beyond this, and upon the margin of the
latter elevation the possible inhabitant gazed upon the sea from the
edge of an intrusive dike of rock, which, wall-like, rose along the
edge of the western wave, its anterior face marked in most places by
rising piles of fragmental rock.
Northward it rose to steeper heights whose unencumbered exposures made
sheer precipices above the frothing billows sweeping in at their feet.
The grass crept to the very verge of these dizzy elevations, the mist
rolled down upon them at moments, and again they described angular
apices of dark stone against the clear blue or cloud flecked zenith.
From these latter pinnacles of observation the Fair Land with its
mountains and rivers and valleys could be well discerned on the east,
and the glittering spire of the ice mountain with its wide skirts of
ice imperfectly descried northward.
At the moment of time when the retrospective and imaginative eye of
this narrator fell upon the secluded upland, mentioned above, a path
led down to the valley and its lake, a path somewhat precariously
conducted over overhanging walls of rock. It crossed the valley almost
lost to sight in tall grass, rose upon the lower swell and seemed to
carry its adventuresome follower straight over the edge of the trap
dike into the sea.
A little reckless exploration would have shown, however, that it led to
no such useless and careless termination. It became on the face of the
trap dike a very broken and disjointed path indeed, but still a path.
It became a ladder of rocky steps, which, if successfully followed,
brought the traveller to a beach of water-worn and rounded pebbles,
which again southward disappeared into a more extended sand plain.
Behind this sand plain the dike precipice visibly dwindled, until it
too disappeared beneath the folds of a sparsely wooded shore. To any
human eye, perhaps unwontedly addicted to piercing the air with its
long vision, there would have been discerned far out to sea a line of
foaming breakers careering upon jagged backs of rock, and again even
beyond this, like ghosts, white ice-bergs, tilted or erect, following
each other in a spectral march.
On the upland where the path we have thus traced to the shore, began,
somewhat withdrawn into the shadows of the colossal trunks of trees,
were a few covered spaces made habitable by skins and boughs of
trees. Their design, if design could be applicable to so undesigned
a structure, consisted in a few posts lightly driven in the soil,
connected at their upper ends by long sapling stems, which were again
connected by crossed boughs, on which the lesser twigs were left
undisturbed, and on this light webbing were piled more boughs and
leaves until the accumulation assumed a mounded shape. By the fertility
of nature, seeds, falling in this nidus of gradually accumulating
leaf mould, had started into life, and, augmented through the years,
had converted it into a sort of herbal patch, which in the season of
blossoming became gay and radiant with flowers.
Beneath this ornamental roof the slender equipment of an aboriginal
camp was spread. A rude crane suspended from the roof, at a point where
a chimney-like opening had been made in the surplusage of leaves and
boughs, supported a stone vessel, pendent from it by cords of tree
fibre or coarse grass. The stone vessel was blackened by repeated
exposure to the dull fires made from leaves and peat moss, and
resembled the few others which, discarded and broken, seemed carefully
laid aside at one corner of this well ventilated apartment. The only
other noticeable furnishment of the room were the skins of foxes and
bears, rankly oleaginous and discolored, thrown down around the central
fire place, where were gathered in a disorderly pile a few stone axes
with wooden handles, some awkwardly made bows, and a few delicately
chipped blades of stone, neatly united to shafts of wood by means of a
black pitch.
No walls enclosed this defective suggestion of a house, and only on
one side hung a woven mat of natural fibre hideously bedaubed with
red paint or iron ochre, most shockingly constrained to portray a
portentous animal rising hobby-horse like on its hind and abnormally
lengthened legs.
It was thirty thousand years, more or less, before the birth of Christ
that a woman stood leaning against one of the four corner posts of this
simple habitation at the widened and worn opening of the highland path
described above, and gazed upward to the sky, in whose sapphire depths
the rising sun of day had begun to form clouds, sucked up from the
broad western ocean.
[Illustration]