It was the second hill, as you came from the east, that was called simply "the mountain." It ran almost due north and south; its western half was a steep and even slope, its more gradual eastern side was toothed with countless prongs flung into sunrise lowlands, brought up abruptly by the sandstone crags to the east. The crest of the mountain was indented irregularly by rounded gaps or passes, like pie-crust carelessly forked. The rocks that broke through its summit tilted sharply to the east, just under the surface of the mountain. Four miles nearer the sunset, beyond Bragg Valley and Adamsville, the iron city, was the third hill, whose rocks slanted at almost the same angle as the mountain's, but in the opposite direction. This had once been the mountain's sunset slope. Flanking the central heights to east and west the sandstone hills, "Shadow Mountain," and "Sand Mountain" beyond West Adamsville, were at once younger and older than the central ridges,--later in their depositing, earlier in their contact with the sky. A mountain has no memory, as men have. Outside forces may gash and groove it, as memory is cut into the mountain's wandering sons; but these scars have no meaning to the hill itself: they are only legible to its more meditative children. If the mountain had had memory, it would have been able to think back to a period long past. Then it lay germinating beneath a slowly thickening crust of clay and sand, under a restless sea swarming with jelly-like bodies and strange shelled creatures. The former left no trace; the armored creepers, dying, left their self-built monuments, to swell and pimple the oozy wave deposits. Buried, unborn, the mountain lay for lengthening ages. But the skin of the earth is restless, as the inner fires waver in their long cooling. Beneath the volatile cloak of air, and the tidal robe of waters, the rocky layer encrusting the unknown vast core of the earth moves in its own hour. A slow adjustment, a period of planetary shudders, and a land is engulfed, a continent pressed upward. The thick strata, the product of long and intermittent deposits, are buckled, folded, and squeezed into mountain chains; huge slices of ageless schists and gneisses are torn away and driven above the younger strata; there is an immense crumpling and rupture. So are the hills born. At last the time of parturition came for the mountain. Force, says Marx, is the midwife of progress; force, a vast and burning upheaval from below, a strained and spasmodic pressure from the molten womb of the earth, bowed the mountain out of its deep resting place, tilted away the early sea, arched its summit high over the surrounding lowlands. The stress of its long birth-pangs squeezed and fused its scattered substance into a closer, more welded body. Above it still folded its sandy younger covering, shutting it from sun and cloaking sky.