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Updated: May 12, 2025
As it happens, this second Grand Cañon is only in plain, nearby, home-staying America; so when boys of the Forest Service pulled Little Zeke out of his gypsum and pumice stone dust and measured him up and found him only twenty-three inches long, though the hair sticking to the skull was gray and the teeth were those of an adult as it happened in only matter-of-fact, commonplace America, poor Little Zeke couldn't get shelter.
His dull, malleable clay, and ductile, shining bronze had taught him nothing of the way in which light and shadow corrode, blur, and pattern a surface. His fancy, his skill, embraced the human form like the gypsum of the moulder, received the stamp of its absolute being.
We must, therefore, look for some extensive condition. If we seek some case in the present, parallel to the one already indicated, we perhaps can find none better than one on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, where, because of dry climate and the shallow waters, the deposition of gypsum and salt is now going on.
The heat was terrific, and animals and humans suffered alike while the gypsum dust which rose in clouds added to the discomfort. Gnats and mosquitoes, deer-flies and "no-see-ems" attacked in clouds and as viciously as if they had double rows of teeth and rapiers.
To prevent the moisture from penetrating into the brick-work and gradually destroying the building, there were interposed between the bricks and the mass of soil, first a layer of reeds mixed with bitumen, then a double layer of burnt brick cemented with gypsum, and thirdly a coating of sheet lead. The ascent to the garden was by steps.
In the plains gypsum serves as a base or foundation for the wide banks of clay that spread over the country, and are much less thick than in the south of Chaldæa. Alabaster is there to be met with in great quantities, often but little below the surface of the soil. It is a sulphate of chalk, gray in colour, soft and yet susceptible of polish.
I visited the quarries, soon after the discovery was made known, with M. Desnoyers, who also showed me large slabs in the Museum at Paris, where, on the upper planes of stratification, the indented foot-marks were seen, while corresponding casts in relief appeared on the lower surfaces of the strata of gypsum which were immediately superimposed.
Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest tree. Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and throw it into a water-hole. This the Mura-muras see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky.
I notice my neighbors who sow gypsum on their alfalfa get a very much better yield of hay than those who do not. Gypsum is sulphate of lime.
Hence all the world over, wherever we come upon a bed of rock salt, it almost invariably lies upon a floor of solid gypsum.
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