Book Description

Excerpt from Petrified Forest, National Monument, Arizona An Appreciation of The Petrified Forest of Arizona By Chas. F.Lummis Author of Some Strange Corners of Our Country, The Land of Poco Tiempo, Pueblo Indian Folk Stories, etc. Written Especially for the United States Railroad Administration Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. The Tempest. Sequoia in California is the oldest creature alive. It had measured a millennium when Christ walked the earth. But thats no time at all. Ten thousand ages before the cedars bloomed on Lebanon, away out here in the Wonderland of our own Southwest, the Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines identical pines that are with us to this day. Not, indeed, as they were in that incalculable Past for they have Put on Immortality, and are this side of Resurrection. They lived their green millenniums, and were laid to bed under the coverlet of a continent, to sleep ten times as long as Parasite Man has crawled upon this globe. And since, for as many aeons, the tireless moths of Erosion have been gnawing away their league-thick blankets, till at last they are bared again to the Arizona sun the most imperishable of earthly things, and of fadeless beauty; a Forest in Glorified Stone, its very bark and rings immortalized in agate. Not as that classic Munchausen of the Grand Canyon, Capn John Hance, loved to tell. A forest of petrified trees, with petrified birds flying through petrified air, singing petrified songs but prostrate and unmurmuring trunks upon a stark desert bed. How great was once this grove of giant conifers and willow-kind, no man will ever know nor how much is still buried, where ancient lava flows have pinned its sedimentary blankets down. Some 400,000 acres of it are uncovered in extent and beauty the noblest petrified forest in the world. Only the diamond is harder than its wood; only the opal so rainbowed. Some cosmic cataclysm mowed it down, orderly and at a scythe-swing. Not cyclone nor freshet Noahs flood turned against it could not have felled it so fair. It is no tangle of windfall or flotsam. Swath by swath it fell, its lofty tops generally to the south. Perhaps a far vaster earthquake than later split the Mogollon plateau to the beginnings of the Grand Canyon was the agent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.