THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 
snows of winter and the dews of summer had the 
force of dynamite. 
When I get especially rock-hungry, and the trog- 
lodyte in me gets restless, as he is apt to in all of us, 
I take a walk to the ledges on Pine Hill, or on Hem- 
lock Ridge, and prowl about their caverns and 
loiter under their overhanging strata, putting my 
hand in the little niches and pockets where I kept 
my trinkets and choice possessions when I was a 
troglodyte, inspecting the phcebe’s mossy nest on a 
little shelf where the four-footed beasts cannot 
reach it, cleaning out the spring that shows likea 
small eye under the rocky eyebrow, creeping through 
what we boys called the “Indian oven.” 
When you want to read a stirring and heroic 
chapter in the great rock volume of the earth, the 
very Iliad or Odyssey of the rocks, go to the Grand 
Cafion of the Colorado, or to Yosemite. As you 
gaze, a sentence from Job may come to your mind 
as it did to a friend of mine — “Where wast thou 
when I laid the foundations of the earth?”’ 
All through the Southwest the great book of geo- 
logic Revelation lies open to the traveler in an as- 
tonishing manner. Its massive but torn and crum- 
pled leaves of limestone, sandstone, and basalt lie 
spread out before him all through Colorado, New 
Mexico, and Arizona, and he may read snatches of 
the long geologic record from the flying train. 
I myself need not go so far to see what time can 
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