Among the Forces - Henry White Warren (books for 8th graders TXT) 📗

like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight of the canon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light" had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable canon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it. God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light.

One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama, parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm. The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.

The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and sang:

"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air."


THE YELLOWSTONE PARK GEYSERS

THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I have been to school. Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful teacher. She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through conic sections. The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down. In the center of this was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a height of from two to five feet. I sat down with it half an hour, compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations. There were all the essentials of a geyser. There was a mound, not always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated with mineral. It might be three feet high; it might be thirty. There was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces. It might be half an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of the Excelsior geyser. It might rise six inches; it might rise two hundred and fifty feet. There was the interval between the jets. It might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years.

A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic." Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole in the middle about one foot across. The water was perfectly calm. But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically, without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool. One could stride the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear. He might be using the calm depth for a mirror. But stay a moment too long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst.

The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward. I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood. In the center was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of the earth. That was not the geyser--it was only the trump through which the archangel was to blow. I had heard the preliminary tuning of the instrument.

The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued five or six hours before the grand eruption. I hovered near the grand stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that famous spouter.

Geysers are more than a trifle freaky. "Old Faithful" is a notable exception. Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty feet high. Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days. This Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours. When I finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been duly exhibited. I first carefully noted the frequency and height of the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale. There were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet. Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet in height. People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off. I said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now." Stage loads of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes, and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time--not to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy. A photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most friendly way.

Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder, one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the desert. The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps a million times. Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that elevated masonry with a rushing cascade. Shifting my position a little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious outpour with rainbows. At such times one can neither measure nor express emotions by words. In the thunder which anyone can hear there is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is for thy precious sake."

In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated steam succeeded. At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown. No archangel could have done better. As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the air. It looked more like lines of water than separated drops. I found it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air.

I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top. I could have put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power. What a sight it was! There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam. At thirty-two minutes from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine. All pure steam is invisible. At the same time the note