THE RIVER OLDER THAN THE MOUNTAINS. 153 
The contracting or shriveling of the earth causes the rocks near the 
surface to wrinkle or fold, and such a fold was started athwart the course of 
the river. Had it been suddenly formed, it would have been an obstruction 
sufficient to turn the water in a new course to the east, beyond the extension 
of the wrinkle; but the emergence of the fold above the general surface of 
the country was little or no faster tHan the progress of the corrasion of the 
channel. We may say, then, that the river did not cut its way down through 
the mountains, from a height of many thousand feet above its present site, 
but, having an elevation differing but little, perhaps, from what it now has, 
as the fold was lifted, it cleared away the obstruction by cutting a canon, 
and the walls were thus elevated on either side. The river preserved its 
level, but mountains were lifted up; as the saw revolves on a fixed pivot, 
while the log through which it cuts is moved along. The river was the saw 
which cut the mountains in two. 
Recurring to the time before this wrinkle was formed, there were beds 
of sandstone, shale, and limestone, more than twenty four thousand feet in 
thickness, spread horizontally over a broad stretch of this country. Then 
the summit of the fold slowly emerged, until the lower beds of sandstone 
were lifted to the altitude at first occupied by the upper beds, and if these 
upper beds had not been earned away, they would now be found more than 
twenty four thousand feet above the river, and we should have a billow of 
sandstone, with its axis lying in an easterly and westerly direction, more 
than a hundred miles in length, fifty miles in breadth, and over twenty four 
thousand feet higher than the present altitude of the river, gently rounded 
from its central line above to the foot of the slope on either side. But as 
the rocks were lifted, rains fell upon them and gathered into streams, and 
the wash of the rains and the corrasion of the rivers cut the billow down 
almost as fast as it rose, so that the present altitude of these mountains 
marks only the difference between the elevation and the denudation. 
It has been said that the elevation of the wrinkle was twenty-four thou 
sand feet, but it is probable that this is not the entire amount, for the present 
altitude of the river, above the sea, is nearly six thousand feet, and when this 
20 COL 
