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Updated: June 18, 2025
We passed through an interesting country, filled with wind-carven pillars and minarets, eroded shelves and caverns, and lunched at noonday beside a dozen boiling sulphur springs. We also passed Cañoncito, the little village which was the home of José Cordova. As we came in sight of the tinned spires of the church at Jemez, we heard a distinct murmur, and halted at once.
Oliver followed him to the steps and down. Near the bottom, the steps were damp and slippery. A sign warned them not to go farther: Danger! Large Waves Come Without Warning! His father ignored the sign and walked to the edge of a deep fissure in the dark rock. It was twenty feet wide and thirty yards long, narrowing as it approached a circular grotto eroded into the base of the cliff.
Yet if this calculation overpowers us, what shall we say of the reflections awakened by the fact that all the limestone cliffs along the lofty edges of the Cañon are composed of fossils, the skeletons of creatures that once lived here covered by an ocean, and that ten thousand feet of strata, which formerly towered above the present summits of the Cañon walls, have been eroded and swept downward to the sea!
They tramped on steadily toward the low narrow line of green trees, and the sun sank toward the hills. The game trails converged at a point where the steep, eroded bank had been broken down into an approach to a pool. The dust was deep here, and arose in a cloud as a little band of zebra scrambled away.
Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Canyon city, we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire effects so great from means apparently so simple; rain striking light hammer blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air and light, gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river sawing the plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste, and exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in hundreds of sections, the softer, less resisting beds weathering and receding faster, thus undermining the harder beds, which fall, not only in small weathered particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving masses, assisted down from time to time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents rushing the fallen material to the river, keeping the wall rocks constantly exposed.
Eroded by wind and water, it reminded her most of photographs she had seen of Monument Valley in the west, though not so old or well defined. Then there was the phenomenon of the line of granite cliffs from which she now surveyed the valley. As nearly as she could tell it ran directly north-south at an altitude varying from five- to fifteen-hundred feet.
We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end upon which Haleakala is situated. Haleakala is eroded comparatively little.
The rocks above 5000 feet were gneiss; below this, cliffs of very micaceous schist were met with, having a north-west strike, and being often vertical; the boulders again were always of gneiss. The streams seemed rather to occupy faults, than to have eroded courses for themselves; their beds were invariably rocky or pebbly, and the waters white and muddy from the quantity of alumina.
The intricate labyrinth of canals, channels, straits, passages, sounds, narrows, etc. between the islands, and extending into the mainland, of course manifest in their forms and trends and general characteristics the same subordination to the grinding action of universal glaciation as to their origin, and differ from the islands and banks of the fiords only in being portions of the pre-glacial margin of the continent more deeply eroded, and therefore covered by the ocean waters which flowed into them as the ice was melted out of them.
"From what we've seen already, it looks promising. Of course, there'll be a deal of work to do; but there are excellent possibilities here. First rate." Fortune seemed bent on favoring them. The limestone cliff, fantastically eroded, offered a score of shelters, some shallow and needing to be walled up in front, others deep and tortuous. All was in utter confusion.
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