“No description,” says Lieutenant Ives, one of the first explorers of this river, “can convey the idea of the varied and majestic grandeur of this peerless waterway.  Wherever the river turns, the entire panorama changes.  Stately facades, august cathedrals, amphitheatres, rotundas, castellated walls, and rows of time-stained ruins, surmounted by every form of tower, minaret, dome and spire, have been moulded from the cyclopean masses of rock that form the mighty defile.”  Who will say, after this, that water is not the grandest of all sculptors, as it cuts through hundreds of miles of rock, forming such magnificent granite groups, not only unsurpassed but unequalled by any of the works of man?

But we must not look upon water only as a cutting instrument, for it does more than merely carve out land in one place, it also carries it away and lays it down elsewhere; and in this it is more like a modeller in clay, who smooths off the material from one part of his figure to put it upon another.

Running water is not only always carrying away mud, but at the same time laying it down here and there wherever it flows.  When a torrent brings down stones and gravel from the mountains, it will depend on the size and weight of the pieces how long they will be in falling through the water.  If you take a handful of gravel and throw it into a glass full of water, you will notice that the stones in it will fall to the bottom at once, the grit and coarse sand will take longer in sinking, and lastly, the fine sand will be an hour or two in settling down, so that the water becomes clear.  Now, suppose that this gravel were sinking in the water of a river.  The stones would be buoyed up as long as the river was very full and flowed very quickly, but they would drop through sooner than the coarse sand.  The coarse sand in its turn would begin to sink as the river flowed more slowly, and would reach the bottom while the fine sand was still borne on.  Lastly, the fine sand would sink through very, very slowly, and only settle in comparatively still water.

From this it will happen that stones will generally lie near to the bottom of torrents at the foot of the banks from which they fall, while the gravel will be carried on by the stream after it leaves the mountains.  This too, however, will be laid down when the river comes into a more level country and runs more slowly.  Or it may be left together with the finer mud in a lake, as in the lake of Geneva, into which the Rhone flows laden with mud and comes out at the other end clear and pure.  But if no lake lies in the way the finer earth will still travel on, and the river will take up more and more as it flows, till at last it will leave this too on the plains across which it moves sluggishly along, or will deposit it at its mouth when it joins the sea.

Week 15