WIND-GRAVED MESAS 227 



WIND-GRAVED MESAS AND THEIR MESSAGE 



By Dr. CHARLES R. KEYES 



DES MOINES 



STRANGE and striking are the positive features of landscape pre- 

 sented by the continental divide in our southern arid country of 

 New Mexico and Arizona. Wildest, least visited and most desolate 

 section of our land is this, over which to-day still roams at will the 

 aborigine in numbers greater for size of area than was ever known in 

 any part of our realm since advent of European. Yet it was this very 

 portion of our broad domain which was already settled by old-world 

 men within fifty years after the landing of Columbus on Salvador. 

 Before that time for more than twenty centuries there flourished within 

 that region a peaceful and highly cultured race. 



Throughout most of our desert lands the smooth illimitable plains 

 are thickly studded by short, isolated, yet lofty mountain-ranges, which 

 rise from the sea of earth as volcanic isles out of a glassy ocean. 

 Desert-ranges form a distinctive mountain-type. As relief characters 

 they attract wide attention from traveler and scientist alike, for they 

 are the most impressive of the local features of topography. 



In that part of the arid country of which we now speak there are 

 none of these high mountains. The " Inselberglandschaf t," as the 

 Germans call it, still persists, but in different form. Instead of majestic 

 peaks and lofty ranges there are lower truncated hills which rise even 

 more abruptly from the general plains-surface. Mesas, or "tables," 

 the Spanish-speaking settlers aptly denominate them. (Fig. 1.) The 

 region is preeminently a mesa-land; therefore one of the most inter- 

 esting and geologically one of the most instructive in all our domain. 



That any part of a great continental divide should be a vast plain 

 in place of a towering mountain ridge is primarily a result of geologic 

 structure and secondarily of peculiarity of climate. In western New 

 Mexico the broad plain occupying the divide is 7,000 feet above tide. 

 So even is it that in crossing one is unaware of the time when he ceases 

 to ascend on the Atlantic slope and begins to go down on the Pacific 

 side. The ocean-to-ocean railway excavates its grade on the top of the 

 continent only a scant half-dozen feet — one of the shallowest cuts on 

 its entire line. 



Mesas of the mesa-land impart to the landscape features entirely 

 novel. Nowhere else on the face of the earth do they reach such notable 



