400 SKETCHES OF U ME AT ION. 



fertile as the Valley of the Mississippi. A great river 

 watered it for a thousand miles, while a hundred tributa- 

 ries dispensed fertility throughout the region which was 

 then the garden, as it is now the desert, of the continent. 

 That fertile plateau has been drained to death. Each 

 stream has drilled a frightful chasm deep through the 

 rocky foundations of the plain (Fig. 96, 97). The mother 

 stream, the Colorado, dwarfed to a withered mockery of 

 what it was, now creeps along at the bottom of a narrow 

 gorge whose rocky walls rise, in places, more than a mile 

 in height. From the brink of this appalling chasm, three 

 hundred miles in length, your vision struggles down six 

 thousand feet into the realm of twilight ; and in this prison 

 the attenuated Colorado — patriarch of American rivers — 

 is wasting its senile energies from year to year, but, with 

 " the ruling passion strong in death," it is still carrying off 

 the land, even though each season's work sinks it into a 

 deeper grave. 



Such are the works of running streams and corroding 

 waves. The record of their labors is the utterance of the 

 destiny of the land. History inverted becomes prophecy. 

 The doom of the mountains is engraven upon their rocky 

 buttresses. Half the pride of the Alleghanies has already 

 been removed. Rounded hill-top is dissolving into plain. 

 Defiant granite, which buffeted the lightnings that rent 

 Sinai, and frowned upon the flood that drowned "the 

 world," shall yet be brought down by the multitudinous 

 pelting of rain, and the insidious sapping of frost. The 

 mountains shall be wiped off. The continents shall be 

 worn out. The rivers will have dug their graves. The 

 ocean will have eaten up the land ; and all there was of the 

 dwelling-place of man will be a rocky islet, a ragged bluff, 

 a sunken reef — the crumbs that fell from old Ocean's meal. 



There was a time when, by degrees, the continents were 



