Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five or six hundred feet
above tidewater, there is a bold rocky point upon which the old
ice-sheet bore heavily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. The great hand in
this case moved from the northeast and must have fairly made this
rocky prominence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched and
grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered away, leaving the rock
quite rough; its general outlines alone tell the tale of the battle
with the ice. But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached and toppled
over, turning topsy-turvy before it had weathered, and it lies in
such a position, upheld by two rock fragments, that its glaciated
surface, though protected from the weather, is clearly visible. You
step down two or three feet between the two upholding rocks and are
at the entrance of a little cave, and there before you, standing at
an angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page written over
with the history of the passing of the great ice plane. The surface
exposed is ten or twelve feet long, and four or five feet wide, and
it is as straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves are as
sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I often take the college
girls there who come to visit me, to show them, as I tell them,
where the old ice gods left their signatures. The girls take turns
in stooping down and looking along the under surface of the rock,
and feeling it with their hands, and marveling. They have read or
heard about these things, but the reading or hearing made little
impression upon their minds. When they see a concrete example, and
feel it with their hands, they are impressed. Then when I tell them
that there is not a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one
time two or three thousand feet thick above the place where they now
stand, and that it bore down upon Julian's Rock with a weight of
thousands of tons to the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson
River Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of miles
around them, riding over the tops of the Catskills and of the
Adirondacks, and wearing them down and carrying fragments of rock
torn from them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest,--when
I have told them all of this, I have usually given them a mouthful
too big for them to masticate or swallow. As a sort of abstract
proposition contained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do
not mind it, but as an actual fact, here in the light of common day
on the hill above Slabsides, with the waters of the Hudson
glistening below, and the trees rustling in the wind all about us,
that is quite another matter. It sounds like a dream or a fable.
Many of the processes that have made our globe what we see it have
been so slow and on such a scale that they are quite beyond our
horizon--beyond the reach of our mental apprehension. The mind has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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