CHAPTER XI 
MOUNTAINS AND HILLS 
THE mountains have more than once been 
characterized as the ‘‘backbone” of the globe 
or of the continent, but one cannot think the 
simile other than misleading. The globe has 
no more backbone than the sun-baked bowl of 
a Zufii Indian. It has not even a rib or a 
vertebra; and the mountain-ridge is no more 
its binding member than the upheaved track 
of a mole across a garden is the band that 
holds the garden together. The mountain- 
ridge, however, is not produced in the same way 
as the mole-ridge. The great layers of rock, 
piled up on end like the poles of an Indian’s 
tepee, that make the Alpine peaks, are more the 
result of lateral pressure than direct upheaval. 
They were pushed up as a wrinkle in the crust 
of the earth, and the beds of loose soil that 
lay above the rock were rolled back into the 
valley, leaving the ragged edges of the crust 
exposed to view. In other words, a mountain- 
213 
Mountain- 
ridges. 
