44 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



in the park, and a hundred geysers ; how many 

 more there are nobody knows. 



These valleys at the heads of the great rivers 

 may be regarded as laboratories and kitchens, 

 in which, amid a thousand retorts and pots, we 

 may see Nature at work as chemist or cook, cun- 

 ningly compounding an infinite variety of mineral 

 messes ; cooking whole mountains ; boiling and 

 steaming flinty rocks to smooth paste and mush, 

 — yellow, brown, red, pink, lavender, gray, and 

 creamy white, — making the most beautiful mud 

 in the world ; and distilling the most ethereal 

 essences. Many of these pots and caldrons have 

 been boiling thousands of years. Pots of sul- 

 phurous mush, stringy and lumpy, and pots of 

 broth as black as ink, are tossed and stirred with 

 constant care, and thin transparent essences, too 

 pure and fine to be called water, are kept simmer- 

 ing gently in beautiful sinter cups and bowls 

 that grow ever more beautiful the longer they 

 are used. In some of the spring basins, the 

 waters, though still warm, are perfectly calm, and 

 shine blandly in a sod of overleaning grass and 

 flowers, as if they were thoroughly cooked at last, 

 and set aside to settle and cool. Others are 

 wildly boiling over as if running to waste, thou- 

 sands of tons of the precious liquids being thrown 

 into the air to fall in scalding floods on the clean 

 coral floor of the establishment, keeping onlook- 

 ers at a distance. Instead of holding limpid pale 



