Through our unknown Southwest, the wonderland of the United States-- little known and unappreciated-- the home of the cliff dweller and the Hopi, the forest ranger and the the lure of the painted desert . a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark onthe outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pureonyx and agate in the middle. Somehow you thinkof that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the starson the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods of medicine-men spilled hishuge bag of precious stone all over the gravel inthis fashion. Then someone cries out, Why,
Through our unknown Southwest, the wonderland of the United States-- little known and unappreciated-- the home of the cliff dweller and the Hopi, the forest ranger and the the lure of the painted desert . a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark onthe outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pureonyx and agate in the middle. Somehow you thinkof that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the starson the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods of medicine-men spilled hishuge bag of precious stone all over the gravel inthis fashion. Then someone cries out, Why, look,thats a tree! and the tally-ho spills its occupantsout helter-skelter; and someone steps off a longblood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both endsin the sand, and shouts out that the visible part ofthe recumbent trunk is 130 feet long. There wasa scientist along with us the day we went out, a manfrom Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java;and he declared without hesitation that many of theseprone, pillared giants must be sequoias of the sameancient family as Californias groves of big what that means! These petrified trees Heso deeply buried in the sand that only treetops and W-. THE GRAND CANON 141 sections of the trunks and broken bits of small upperbranches are visible. Practically no excavation hastaken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and depth and extent of the forest below this ancientocean bed are unknown. Only water — oceans andaeons of water — could have rolled and swept andpiled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was anancient sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoiaforest; and it takes a sequoia from six to ten thou-sand years to come to Its full growth; and that aboutgets you back to the Ancient of Days busy In hisWorkshop making Man out of mud, and Earth outof Chaos. But there Is another side to the Petrified Forestsbesides a prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of thebig or little pieces of petrified wood
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Keywords: ., bookauthorlautagne, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, bookyear1913
