This mountain is a perfect example of the unbelievably powerful forces and the eternal patience of nature, for it was a million years in the making and lay a hundred million years incubating before it arose like a great egg on a vast plain in another hundred million years. Stone Mountain is 1,683 feet above sea level, and 825 feet above the surrounding land which is itself a dividing ridge. Rain water running off the eastern slope goes into the lake and out by the Yellow River. That on the west finds its way to South River. The streams join 50 miles away at Lake Jackson and flow on by the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the Atlantic Ocean. Three or four miles to the north, headwaters of Peachtree Creek start their long trip to the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola. The exposed granite of Stone Mountain covers 25 million square feet, or 583 acres. A surveyor figured the mass at 7,532,750,950 cubic feet. Since that time several million cubic feet have been quarried and shipped away, but all of man’s endeavors show as insignificant peelings taken from the western and eastern slopes. Granite weighs 167.9 pounds per cubic foot, if you are interested in computing the weight of Stone Mountain. Granite is the universal stone, containing practically all the natural elements from uranium and aluminum to iron and silica and the rarer minerals. It decomposes into fertile soil, as is readily seen by the growth that springs up where a little dirt and moisture collect on the gentler slopes of the mountain. Stone Mountain is near the foot of the Appalachians, an extremely ancient mountain chain originally composed of granite gneiss. The peaks, in their youth, rose much higher than the brash young Rockies, or even taller than the Himalayas. Three hundred million years ago, when Stone Mountain was born, the land in the area stood perhaps 10,000 feet higher than it does now. During a period that may have lasted a million years or more, molten stone under tremendous pressure was pushed upward from deep in the earth. If the force behind it had been sufficient to drive it out at the surface, the rock would have cooled rapidly and would have assumed a different form. The weight of two miles or so of rocks and earth overhead was sufficient to contain the tremendous pressure of the molten flow, so the upper crust literally floated on a hot liquid base. Something had to give as liquid rock thrust into an area where there was no space. Forty miles or so to the northwest is a chain of mountains, of which Kennesaw is the tallest, formed by pressure from the side which buckled underlying rocks up like a steep roof, or folded layers over each other. Some of that pressure may have been applied by Stone Mountain. This admittedly is theory—upper layers which held much of the factual story have long since washed away. [Illustration: {uncaptioned}]