THE STORY OF A STRANGE LAND. 



descend to the depth of twelve hundred feet, and 

 yet give no glimpse of the granite below, while at 

 their side are mountains of lava whose crags tower 

 a mile above the bottom of the ravines. 



At last, after many years or centuries, time 

 does not count for much in these Tertiary days, 

 the flow of melted lava ceased. Its surface cooled, 

 leaving a high, uneven plain, black and desolate, 

 a hard, cold crust over a fiery and smouldering 

 interior. About the crater lay great ropes and 

 rolls of the slowly hardening lava, looking like 

 knots and tangles of gigantic reptiles of some 

 horrible extinct sort. There was neither grass nor 

 trees, no life of any sort. Nothing could grow in 

 the coarse black stone. The rivers and brooks 

 had long since vanished in steam, the fishes were 

 all dead, and the birds had flown away. The 

 whole region wore the desolation of death. 



But to let land go to waste is no part of Mother 

 Nature's plan. So even this far-off corner of her 

 domain was made ready for settlement. In the 

 winter she sifted snow on the cold black plain, and 

 in the summer the snow melted into a multitude 

 of brooks and springs. The brooks gradually 

 wore paths and furrows down the lava bed, and 

 the sands which they washed from one place they 

 piled up in another. The winds blew the seeds of 

 grasses about, and willows and aspens crept up 

 the mountain-sides. Then came the squirrels, 

 scattering the nuts of the pine. Other seeds came, 

 too, in other ways, till at last the barren hillside 

 was no longer barren. 



The brooks ran over the surface of the crust 



