Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.); West (U.S.) -- Social life and customs
Being somewhat weary I dropped down in the shady side of the ravine to
rest and gazed up and down at the mute records of the past which were
scattered around me. It seemed as if the monsters whose bones lay there
were suddenly reincarnated. A group of Titanotheria seemed to be
assembled in a vast body; the Rhinoceros, Oreodon, and diminutive horse
such as lived in those parts, were gathered around, each apparently
ready to tell its tale of events which no man ever had heard before. A
Titanotherium Robustum, smacking its huge jaws, turned its dull eyes
upward to the summit of the great bluff 700 feet above where I was
resting, and then turning its gaze toward me, said, "What are you? You
are the first specimen of your genus that has ever passed this way. How
old are you?" "A score or two of years," I replied. There was a roar of
grunts doubtless intended for laughter which echoed up and down the
ravine, and the pachyderm looked at the oreodon and smiled. Continuing,
the Titanotherium said, "Do you see the top of that lofty bluff?" I
nodded yes. "Well, that is young, and it is not more than three or four
decillion years since this country was pushed up and has been washing
down the river. Before that, it was under water for nearly as long a
period, because it was mighty slow work filling in all that 1,500
perpendicular feet of clay out of which all the layers of these bluffs
are made."
The Rhinoceros then grunted out his reminiscences, to the effect that
all that occurred long after his day, because he was doing business
before the beginning of that vast cycle when the country was so deep
under water, and before these deposits were made. Continuing, he added,
"Away back in those times a very bad spell of wet weather and floods
occurred, when we all were caught and stuck in this swamp which finally
dried up on all this great crowd of companions of a bygone age. Since we
were washed out by the last winter and spring rains which swept down
this gully we have seen nothing, and you are the first two-legged
creature we ever saw, except a few dinosaurs, and but very few of them
lived in these parts."
After this dreamy colloquy I woke up from my little rest, and the
shadows of the prehistoric pachyderms vanished, but the thousands of
bones were still protruding from the walls of the deep ravine.
"The waters stood upon the mountains;
At Thy rebuke they fled;
He uncovereth deep things out of darkness,
And bringeth out to light the shadow of death."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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