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Another group contended hotly that Venus was an arid desert of wind-carved sandstone, dry and cruel, whipping dust into clouds that sunlight could never penetrate. Others prognosticated an ocean planet with little or no solid ground at all, populated by enormous serpents waiting to greet the first Earthlings with jaws agape. But nobody knew, of course. Venus was the planet of mystery.
Such wind-carved pebbles are sometimes found in ancient rocks and may be accepted as evidence that the sands of which the rocks are composed were blown about by the wind. In moist climates denudation is continually impeded by the mantle of waste and its cover of vegetation, and the land surface can be lowered no faster than the waste is removed by running water.
In what way can a wind-carved pebble be distinguished from a river-worn pebble? from a glaciated pebble? We have already seen that the ocean is the goal at which the waste of the land arrives. The mantle of rock waste, creeping down slopes, is washed to the sea by streams, together with the material which the streams have worn from their beds and that dissolved by underground waters.
At last we issued forth into a flat basin, surrounded by the weird hills a grotesque, wind-carved amphitheater, admirably suited for a witches' orgy. Some bleached bison heads with horns lay scattered about the place, and a cluster of soapweeds grew there God knows how! They thrust their sere yellow sword-blades skyward with the pitiful defiance of desperate things.
Wind-carved pebbles are characteristically planed, the facets meeting along a summit ridge or at a point like that of a pyramid. We may suppose that these facets were ground by prevalent winds from certain directions, or that from time to time the stone was undermined and rolled over as the sand beneath it was blown away on the windward side, thus exposing fresh surfaces to the driving sand.
Huge blocks of ice were strewn upon it, ripped off the left-hand wall, but it was nowhere crevassed as badly as the lower glacier, but much more broken up into sérac. Some of the bergs presented very beautiful sights, wind-carved incrustations of snow in cameo upon their blue surface giving a suggestion of Wedgwood pottery.
They grew and grew into mounds, castles, domes, crags, great red wind-carved buttes. One by one they drew my gaze to the wall of upflung rock. I seemed to see a thousand domes of a thousand shapes and colors, and among them a thousand blue clefts, each of which was a canyon.
But as Shefford gazed, and his sight gained strength from steadily holding it to separate features these rocks were strangely magnified. They grew and grew into mounds, castles, domes, crags great, red, wind-carved buttes. One by one they drew his gaze to the wall of upflung rock.
He did not intend to cut his wheat at all. It was a dead loss. "Two sections twelve hundred an' eighty acres!" he repeated, gloomily. "An' the third bad year! Dorn, I can't pay the interest to my bank." Olsen's sun-dried and wind-carved visage was as hard and rugged and heroic as this desert that had resisted him for years.
Bolly had crossed the treacherous belt of dunes and washes and had struck the trail on the other side. The long level of wind-carved rocks under the cliffs, the ridges of the desert, the miles of slow ascent up to the rough divide, the gradual descent to the cedars these stretches of his journey took the night hours and ended with the brightening gray in the east.
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