PIRATES IN THE MOUNTAINS 67 



rabbits and bears may play above the soil 

 washed down by water. But a forest fire may 

 come and consume the forest, then wind or 

 water may start washing and blowing and this 

 sediment from mountain tops, perhaps hundreds 

 of miles upstream, may, after this pleasant stop, 

 again go away on its merry journey toward the 

 sea. 



Every year the land surface all over the earth 

 is lowered just a little by the wash of water. 

 But during long ages this lowering makes a show- 

 ing. Many a mountain has been entirely 

 washed away into the sea. The Appalachian 

 Mountains have had about two miles washed off 

 them. They are about one third their former 

 height. 



The wonderful petrified forests in both the 

 Yellowstone and in Arizona have been uncovered 

 by the washing of water. They may have been 

 covered with several thousand feet of ashes or 

 other material that became rock. But water 

 cut through it all, washing it slowly away. Of 

 course the water often uncovers coal, gold, 

 and strange buried fossils records of animals 

 that lived possibly a million years ago. 



In the sediment that finally reaches the sea 

 at the mouth of a river, say the Mississippi, there 

 is a little of most everything: crushed-up fossils, 

 marble, gold, coal, blue limestone from Kansas, 



