Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
In every direction ran sierras, or rugged mountain-chains, so rocky and steep as to make the kingdom almost impregnable. Yet within their sterile confines lay numbers of deep and rich valleys, prodigal in their fertility.
A thousand of these maha yugs, or 4,320,000,000 of years make a kalpa, or one day of the life of Brahma, and his night is of equal length; a hundred such days and nights measure the time of his life. These books give, as facts, seven great continents, separated by that many rivers and seven mountain-chains four hundred thousand miles high.
There are several, however, that surpass it in the great mountain-chains of the Andes and of Hindustan. The Andes support a lake at 12,000 feet above the sea, and one of the slopes of the Himalaya, in Thibet, encloses and upholds a cup of crystal water 15,600 feet above the level of the Indian Ocean, covering an area, too, of 250 square miles.
Think, or try to think, of the force of pressure that causes the rock-strata to buckle or crumple or bend layers of rock, thousands of feet thick, made to fold and bend like the leaves of a book vast mountain-chains flexed and foreshortened, or ruptured and faulted as the bending of one's body wrinkles or rips one's clothes.
From the west you descend upon it by a way that leads out of cloudy mountain-chains and over chasms spanned by an awful trestle-work; from the south, passing our national Mecca, the Tomb of Washington, your highway is the picturesque Potomac, which here, nearly three hundred miles from the sea, broadly embays itself as if to mirror the magnificence of the place; from the north the track winds along the banks of the Delaware, white with its coastwise commerce, in and out among the beautiful bridges that arch the Schuylkill, across the broad Susquehanna, past blazing forges and foundries, and over the long and lonely expanses of the two Gunpowder Rivers desert wastes of water, stretching for miles away without a sail, without a light, in the melancholy grandeur of a very dream of desolation.
They saw the great masses of granite forming the mountains and mountain-chains, with the stratified rocks resting against their slopes; and they assumed that granite was the first primary agent, and that all stratified rocks must be of a later formation.
All the mountain-chains, such as the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Himalayas, into the composition of whose central and loftiest parts the nummulitic strata enter bodily, could have had no existence till after the Middle Eocene period. During that period the sea prevailed where these chains now rise, for nummulites and their accompanying testacea were unquestionably inhabitants of salt water.
And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.
They saw the great masses of granite forming the mountains and mountain-chains, with the stratified rocks resting against their slopes; and they assumed that granite was the first primary agent, and that all stratified rocks must be of a later formation.
Over the broad expanse of the United States, on the contrary, with such slight variations of level, the disappearance of the ice at its breaking-up would naturally be more complete and continuous than in a country intersected by frequent mountain-chains, where the ice would linger in the higher valleys long after it had disappeared from the plains below.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking