Round about Ashemlle. 293 



over 4000 feet above the sea; the Unaka mountains form a mas- 

 sive chain from 5000 to 6500 feet in height. That streams 

 should thus flow through mountains higher than their source 

 was once explained by the assumption that they found passage 

 through rents produced by earth convulsions ; but that vague 

 guess marked the early and insufficient appreciation of the power 

 of streams as channel cutters, and it has passed discredited into 

 the history of our knowledge of valley-formation. That rivers 

 carve out the deepest caiions, as well as the broadest valleys, is 

 now a truism which we must accept in framing hypotheses to 

 account for the courses of the French Broad and other similar 

 streams. Moi'eover, since waters from a lower Blue Ridge could 

 never of their own impulse have flowed over the higher Unaka, 

 we are brought to the question, was the Blue Ridge once the 

 higher, or have streams working on the western slope of the 

 Unaka range (when it was a main divide), worn it through from 

 west to east, capturing all that broad watershed between the two 

 mountain ranges ? Either hypothesis is within the possibility of 

 well established river action, and both suggest the possibility of 

 infinite change in mountain forms and river systems. Without 

 attempting here to discriminate between these two hypotheses, 

 for which a broader foundation of facts is needed, let us look at 

 the channel of the French Broad below Asheville, in the river's 

 course through the range that is higher than its source. Descend- 

 ing from the old plain into the river's ravine, we at once lose all 

 extended views and are closely shut in by wooded slopes and 

 rocky bluffs. The river falls the more rapidly as we descend, 

 and its tributaries leap to join it, the railroad scarce finding 

 room between the rocks and the brawling current. The way is 

 into a rugged and inhospitable gorge whose walls rise at last on 

 either hand into mountains that culminate some thirty miles 

 below Asheville. At Mountain Island the waters dash beauti- 

 fully over a ledge of conglomerate and rush out from a long 

 series of rapids into the deep water above Hot Springs. Beyond 

 the limestone cove in which the sj^rings occur, the valley, though 

 narrow still, is wider and bottom lands appear. Thus the water 

 gap of the French Broad through the Unakas is narrow and 

 rugged, the river itself a tossing torrent; but had we passed down 

 other streams of similar course, we should have found them even 

 more turbulent, their channels "even more sharply carved in the 

 hard rocks. On Pigeon river there are many cliffs of polished 

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