A reign of ice follows the era of tropic heat. Stupendous glaciers grind the volcanic rocks, and carving new valleys, endow them with fertility for new forests that will rise where once the palm forests stood. With advancing age, the earth grows cold and quiet, awakening only to an occasional volcanic eruption or earthquake as a reminder of former violence. The dawn of history approaches. The country slowly takes on its present shape. Landscape changes are henceforth the work of milder forces, erosion by streams and remnant glaciers. Man appears. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. View from the cliffs at Multnomah Falls (seen on right). Castle Rock is in distance on north side.] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. The broad Columbia, seen from Lone Rock, a small island east of Cape Horn. Shows successive ranges of the Cascades cut by the river, with Archer and Arrowhead Mountains and Castle Rock in distance on north side.] [Illustration: Castle Rock, a huge tower of columnar basalt, 1146 feet high, on north bank of the Columbia, forty miles east of Portland. View from Mosquito Island.] Throughout the cycles of convulsion and revolution which we have witnessed from our eyrie in the clouds, the vital and increasing influence in the building of the Northwest has been the Cascade upfold. First, it merely shuts in a piece of the Pacific. Rising higher, its condensation of the moist ocean wind feeds the thousand streams that convert the inland seas thus enclosed from salt to fresh water, and furnish the silt deposited over their floors. The fractures and faults resulting from its uptilting spread an empire with some of the largest lava flows in geological history. It pushes its snow-covered volcanoes upward, to scatter ashes far to the east. Finally, its increasing height converts a realm of tropical verdure into semi-arid land, which only its rivers, impounded by man, will again make fertile. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. The Columbia, opposite Oneonta Bluffs and Gorge, and Horsetail Falls.] [Illustration: An original American--"Jake" Hunt, former Klickitat chief, 112 years old. He is said to be the oldest Indian on the Columbia.]