These tiny
ferns and mosses, each drawing the sort of sustenance it needed from
the layers of the limestone, seemed greater than the mountain of rock.
Imposing and spectacular, yet the rock was dead,--the mausoleum for
countless forms of the old life that ceased to be in ages long
forgotten. These fairy forms that sprang from it were the beginnings
of the new life, the better era, the cycle of the future, living,
breathing, almost sentient things, transforming the stubborn stone
into beauty of color and form, into faith that moves mountains and
hope that makes this hour the center of all eternity. For them the
river had been patiently working through the centuries, scoring its
channel just a little deeper, cutting down ever so little each year
the face of the cliff. Eternity stretched backward to the time when
the little stream running between the thin edges of the melting ice
sheets at the top of the high plateau first began to cut the channel
and scarp this mighty cliff; still backward through untold ages to the
time when the lowest layer of limestone in the cliff was only soft
sediment on the shore of a summer sea. Eternity stretched forward,
also, to the time when this perpendicular wall shall have been worn to
a gentle slope, clad with luxuriant verdure, and adorned, perchance,
with fairer flowers than any which earth now knows; still forward
through other untold ages to the time when all earth's fires shall
have cooled; when wind, rain, storm and flood, shall have carried even
the slope to the sea and made this planet a plain like Mars.
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