The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

CHAPTER IX

(SEPTEMBER)

Morning

The summer dawn's reflected hue

To purple changed Loch Katrine blue.

—Scott: "Lady of the Lake."

Evening

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

—Tennyson: "The Princess."

IN THE LANDS OF THE LAKES

If we really had spent the month of August in a desert what a relief it would be to find ourselves, as we do now at the very beginning of the golden autumn time, in the lands of the lakes with their cool, fresh breezes, the whisper of leaves and the glint of waters dancing in the sun. The best of it is that the deserts are just as delightful as the lands of pleasant waters, if you only visit them in imagination as we have been doing; and they make the lakes all the more attractive by way of contrast.

I. How the Lakes are Born

But where are the lands of the lakes? I may say to start with, it's no use looking for many lakes in the lands of the big caves. Caves and lakes don't seem to get on together any more than do caves and boulders.

When this story of the lakes was first told to a certain group of young people some of the youngest of whom had not forgotten the giants or the language of their fairy tales, I put it in this way:

"The rains and the rivers, with the help of some other things, have made all the lakes in the world. One of these helpers is a bright-eyed creature with two legs; another a little creature with four legs and a third a great big thing with no legs at all!" (I said it like this: "G-R-E-A-T B-I-G T-H-I-N-G," and opened my eyes wide for the benefit of the younger members of our "pebble parties," as these little gatherings came to be called.)

The great big things, as you have already guessed, were the glaciers of the Ice Age. We have had specimens of their work in the story of how the Great Lakes were made.

The four-legged lake makers are the beavers. They live on the margins of quiet, shallow ponds—really little lakes—which they make for themselves by gnawing down trees and building dams.

And the bright-eyed creature with two legs—can't you guess who he is? If you never helped make little lakes of your own by damming up a brook or a roadside rivulet, you have missed a lot of fun.

WIDE RANGE OF SIZE IN LAKE FAMILY

But you must have made them; what boy hasn't? And those little ponds or puddles were lakes, while they lasted, just as much as the great Lake Superior is a lake. Even lakes that are called lakes and get their names (and often their pictures) in summer resort folders, differ in size, ranging from little affairs that are not much larger than the pond in the meadow, to Lake Superior, with its 31,000 square miles; and in depth, from a few feet to 5,618 feet in the deepest part of Lake Baikal. You see if you touched bottom there you would have to keep going for over a mile.

"And there's all the way back!" said the High School Boy.

THE GREAT LAKES OF TO-DAY AND THE GREATER LAKE OF YESTERDAY

The farmers of Canada and the Dakotas now sow their harvests and reap their golden grain on the bottom of the great inland sea of the Ice Age, Lake Agassiz. It was larger than all the Great Lakes of to-day put together. It is known how big this lake was from its old beaches, which can easily be made out all around the margin shown on the map.

THE BLUE LAKE IN THE VOLCANO'S MOUTH

In the mouth of a dead volcano lies one of the most beautiful lakes in all the world, the chief attraction of Crater Lake National Park. This model of its basin tells how nature did the work. The steep sides and the glacial valleys show that the top fell in when the lava that helped build the volcano sank back and so left it without support. If the top had blown off, as volcano tops sometimes do, the valleys would have been filled with débris. Later there was another outbreak, but so small that it only built that little volcano in the big volcano's mouth. Notice the tiny crater? This baby volcano rises above the waters of its mimic ocean and makes an island, just as so many volcanoes of the great Pacific make the far-flung islands of the Southern Seas.

Even the water ouzel, that wonderful diver of the mountain lakes and waterfalls, might hesitate at a dive like that.

Those remarkable old men of the mountains, the glaciers of the Ice Age, were the greatest of all lake-makers. Although for size the Great Lakes were their masterpieces, they made lakes of all sizes and no end of them. They fairly sowed the landscape with lakes. Look at the map of the lake regions of America and Europe and then turn back to the map picture of the great ice invasion (page 21). Don't you see the lake regions and what was once the ice regions cover practically the same territory?

LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE TO WIZARD ISLAND

There you see is the top of that little volcano—right across the lake. It is known as "Wizard Island." The lake is 4,000 feet deep. Its walls are 1,500 feet high; in some places over 2,000 feet high. In spite of the fact that they, as you see, slope a good deal, owing to the crumbling down of the weathered rock, the banks are still so steep it has taken us several hours of careful climbing to get down where this picture was taken, and we shall be all the rest of the forenoon climbing back again.

In addition to making lakes in their Great Lakes manner the glaciers had other methods. A glacier coming into a dry mountain valley would supply it with a river by melting, and at the same time dam up the river with stones and soil brought down from the mountain and so make a lake. Then the water would run over the brim of the dam, and the thing was complete; a beautiful little lake with one river running into it and another running out.

LOOKS AS IF IT HAD RAINED LAKES!

You just go through Wisconsin or Minnesota or Maine, and right and left you'll see lakes and lakes and lakes: and then more lakes! Of course most of these lakes are small; otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to work so many of them into the same landscape. In Wisconsin you find these small lakes in what are called the "Kettle Ranges." The low hills and their valleys form what the early settlers called "kettles," and in these kettles are the little blue-eyed lakes.

It was the glaciers that not only made the kettles but often filled them with the lakes. In many of the mounds of pebbles and clay that we read about in "The Secrets of the Hills," the glaciers left big blocks of ice. Then, when this ice melted, two things happened: (1) The covering of the ice sank down, much as the sawdust sinks in an ice-house when a block of ice is taken out, thus making the kettle; (2) the big ice cake in the hill of pebbles melted, so filling the kettle with a lake.

But what broke off these big blocks, these land icebergs that made the basins for the kettle lakes? They were left by the glacier when it began to retreat; that is to say when the supply of snow back at the gathering ground became insufficient to keep pushing it forward as fast as the front melted away. Melting most rapidly in those huge cracks called crevasses, big blocks were finally separated entirely from the main body and left behind as the rest of the glacier slowly melted back toward the mountains.

If the glaciers were thus responsible for most of the lakes of the lowlands you may be sure they had a hand in making the lakes of the mountains, right where they themselves live. John Muir, who spent his life in loving study of the mountains of the West and of everything connected with them, found mountain lakes in every stage of existence up the mountainsides; empty stone bowls that showed by the work of the waves on the rocks that they had once held lakes; above these, in the same chain, lakes growing shallow; and, still higher, brand new lakes in stone bowls with the edge of the glacier that had carved out the bowl and filled it with blue water, still bordering it on the upper side.

ONE OF THE KETTLE LAKES OF WISCONSIN

And this is why, like fruit on a tree, the youngest lakes are found at the top. Since the glacier melted from the foot of the range upward the lower lakes were the first to be born and the first to pass away; while the lakes higher up on the mountain were the last to be born and the last to pass away.

II. The Moods of the Lakes

Lakes are like the rivers and the sea; they have their moods. In sunshine and storm, in wind and calm, and from season to season they show many changes. As we already know they are great sleepy heads. To Ruskin mountain lakes seemed both to sleep and to dream. But their longest sleep, like that of Br'er Bear, is taken in the winter. Of this long sleep Mr. Muir says:[37]

"The highest (mountain lakes) are set in bleak, rough bowls, scantily fringed with brown and yellow sedges. Winter storms blow snow through the canyon in blinding drifts, and avalanches shoot from the heights. Then are these sparkling tarns filled and buried, leaving not a hint of their existence. In June and July they begin to blink and thaw out like sleepy eyes, the daisies bloom in turn and the most profoundly buried of them all is at length warmed and summered as if winter were only a dream."

[37] "The Mountains of California."

EVEN THE DUCKS OVERLOOK THESE LITTLE LAKES

But possibly these lakes are not asleep after all! They may be only playing possum; or hide and seek. There are mountain lakes that play hide and seek. That is to say, they hide and you seek; and often you don't find! They are so small that, surrounded as they are by trees, tall and thickly set, even the ducks pass them by. The glaciers that made them seem to have hidden them, as the robins did the babes in the wood. The glaciers did this, not by heaping leaves over them, but by piling up stones and soil around them. They are encircled by moraines, and on the moraines grow the trees that hide the lakelets even from the sharp eyes of the ducks.

A LITTLE GIRL'S PICTURE OF A FAMOUS SWISS LAKE

This picture of the lake of the Great St. Bernard was taken by Phyllis M. Pulliam, who sent it to St. Nicholas with a long, enthusiastic letter, such as only school-girls know how to write. Among other things she met a great St. Bernard dog that had saved more than fifty lives.

Mountain lakes are usually as clear as crystal, and, like perfect mirrors, reflect the outlines and coloring of the clouds and the neighboring peaks. They are apt to contain mica and feldspar ground out of the granite rock by the glacier that made their basins. Then the sunlight falling on these rock particles gives them the color of jade or Nile green, or dark green like a peacock's tail. They are constantly changing color with the changing angles of the light from morning until sunset; and under the passing clouds and the rippling of the winds. The deeper lakes are dark blue in the deepest parts, turning to green in the shallow waters near shore where the yellow of the sun rays and the sand mixes most with the blue of the waters.[38]

[38] Van Dyke: "The Mountain."

THE MYSTERY IS IN THE SECRET PASSAGE

In Florida there are sister lakes so sympathetic that their waters rise and fall together. One responds to the mood of the other as promptly as your right eye waters in sympathy when you get a grain of dust in the left. The reason for this goes back to the days when the corals helped build Florida. They did this by leaving their "bones" on the coral reefs when that part of North America was in the making. These remains formed limestone. Then, in this limestone, "sink holes" were formed on the surface leading to underground passages, just as they do over the land surface in the cave regions of Kentucky. These sink holes often fill with water and form little lakes. These lakes, being connected by the underground passages, rise and fall together. It looks very strange, even when you know the secret of it; and still stranger when you don't.

Yet I shouldn't be surprised if a bright boy or girl seeing two lakes rising or falling together would suspect the underground connection; for, of course, we all know about springs and their underground channels. But what would you say to this:

A lake that, a moment before, was as smooth as glass suddenly begins to shiver all over as one shivers in a sudden draught. But there is no breeze stirring! A moment later the water rises and falls along the banks; an inch, two inches, a foot, two feet. Then, in the course of a couple of hours, the sky, which before was without a cloud, begins to grow black and there follows a terrific storm.

A KIND OF NATURAL BAROMETER

The cause of the rising of the water is the heavier pressure of the air at the farther end of the lake, the region of the coming storm. The water, being forced down at one end of the basin, you see, rises at the other. Then as the storm advances toward you the pressure is released and the water falls again; but for a while it rocks to and fro as water will do in a basin if you tip it up at one end and then let it down again.

THE TIDES IN A TEACUP

But, besides these imitation tides made by the unequal pressure of the wind, lakes have real tides just as the ocean does; and from the same cause, the attraction of the moon. In fact, there are tides in a teacup, and the tea rises toward the passing moon as does everything liquid on the face of the earth. In the teacup the rise is so small you can't see it as you do when the great mass of the ocean waters is moved in the same way. Even in the Great Lakes the tide only amounts to three inches or so.

And, in addition to their tides, there are many other things about lakes that have led the largest of them to be referred to as "inland seas." Says Reclus:[39]

"Lakes are indeed seas. They have their tempests, their swells, their breakers. It is true the waves are neither so high nor move so rapidly as those of the sea because they do not move over such great depths. They are short, compact and choppy, but for this very reason they are more formidable. And the water being fresh and therefore lighter than that of the ocean is more readily agitated. The wind has scarcely begun to stir when the surface is covered with foaming billows."

[39] "The Earth."

Not only are lake storms especially dangerous for the reasons just given by the great French geographer but lakes in mountain regions are subject to an additional danger; for their storms are most apt to come at night, just as described in the story of the storm on Galilee in the New Testament. You remember it says the storm came "down."[40]

[40] Luke 8: 23.

"Now it came to pass on a certain day that Jesus went into a ship with his disciples; and he said unto them, Let us go over unto the other side of the lake. And they launched forth.

"But as they sailed he fell asleep: and there came down a storm of wind on the lake; and they were filled with water and were in jeopardy."

Macgregor, in his "Rob Roy on the Jordan," draws the following vivid picture of his own struggles with one of these tempests:

HOW THE STORM CAME DOWN ON GALILEE

"Just as the Rob Roy passed below Wady Fik a strange, distant hissing sounded ahead where we could see a violent storm was raging. The waves had not time to rise. The gusts had come down on calm water and they whisked long wreaths of it up into the sky. This torrent of heavy, cold air was pouring over the mountain crests into the deep caldron of the lake below. Just as it says in Luke 8:23. 'There came down a storm upon the lake.'"

ON THE BORDERS OF THE SEA OF GALILEE

You can see this is in a desert, mountainous country, and, from the dress of the man, that it is in the Orient. The beach is wide—for so small a lake—because of those frequent and severe storms that drive the waves, loaded with sand and pebbles, far back from the shore.

This peculiarity of squalls among mountains is known to all who have boated much on lakes, but on the Sea of Galilee the wind has a singular force and suddenness. This is no doubt because the sea is so deep in the world that the sun rarefies the air in it enormously and the wind, speeding swiftly over a long and level plateau, suddenly comes upon this huge gap in the way and tumbles down into it.

III. How Lakes Grow Old and Pass Away

But, however formed, lakes, of all the features of our landscape, are the soonest to pass away. Because of the sediment brought into them by the rivers they keep getting more and more shallow and at last, in the course of time, are quite filled up. The waves of the lakes themselves help to bring this about by cutting material from their shores and washing it into the water.

So the time will come when all lakes now in existence will have passed away. But the people of those times will not be without their lakes. New lakes will probably be made by the same causes which produced the lakes of to-day; for Nature's great processes do not change.

WHY LILIES COME TO THE DYING LAKES

Meanwhile how beautifully they pass, these lakes; particularly the little lakes like that in Rousseau's painting. First, on the margin of a dying lake the lilies gather. Lilies grow only in quiet waters and these they find in the shallow margins of lakes that are filling up.

LAST OF ALL COME THE TREES

Next after the lilies come the sedges, grasslike herbs that grow in marshy places. And after they are well established they get things ready for the next arrivals; for these plants come in a regular procession. The dense tufts of the sedges make mats on which soil gathers. In this soil shrubs begin to grow. From the decay of all this vegetation more soil is formed in which the seeds of spruce and tamarack spring up. Then come willows, then poplars and maples, and last of all the oaks and nut-bearing trees, which march into new lands slowly because they must depend on their heavy seeds to move them forward, while the little seeds of maple, willow, poplar, and pine are easily carried by the wind.

"The Lake." From the painting by Rousseau

HOW LAKES GROW OLD AND PASS AWAY

This picture, called "The Lake," is from a painting by Rousseau, a great French landscape artist, and illustrates the beautiful way in which lakes grow old, as described in the text. Already, as you see, Father Oak and his family have arrived.

But while fresh-water lakes and their surroundings are so beautiful and poetic, and never more so than when the lakes are passing away, there are dying lakes, whose surroundings are the very pictures of desolation. These are the lakes which have become bitter with salt because their waters are evaporated by the sun faster than fresh water comes in. The most famous of these salt lakes is the Dead Sea of the Holy Land, into which the Jordan flows. Lying in a rock-bound pit, in the deepest part of a vast trench, it is like a caldron into which for eight months of every year is poured the heat from a burning sun in a cloudless sky. Although Palestine, as you can see by the map, is in the temperate zone, the thermometer here often registers 130 degrees, because cooling breezes never come down into this pit except in those occasional storms due to the sudden rush of cooler and therefore heavier air from the surrounding heights.

THIS IS HOW THE DEAD SEA DIED

As shown by the wave-cut terraces on the surrounding rocks this lake was once a part of a great body of water that extended clear from Mount Hermon to the Red Sea. Then, by a series of heaving movements, widely separated in time (as shown by the depth of the beach terraces) the bottom of this greater sea was uplifted into the two parallel chains of limestone mountains which flank the Jordan Valley. At the same time a great block of earth crust between them settled down, step by step, and made the long trench running clear to Africa, one end of which is the Jordan Valley, in which the Dead Sea lies.

Later, during the different Ice Ages, as it is supposed, there was plenty of moisture, for the rock records show that the Sea of Galilee and what is now the Dead Sea were once parts of the same body of water. Then the climate gradually changed, the land went dry, and the Dead Sea water became far saltier than that of the ocean—so salty that all life died out of it. To-day the water tastes like a mixture of epsom salts and quinine, and any unfortunate fish swept into it by the fresh waters of the Jordan, in which fish are abundant, gives a few desperate gasps and dies.

THE DEAD SEA

HOW THE DEAD SEA DIED

While it is not true, as the ancients believed, that birds drop dead in flying over it, neither birds nor beasts make their homes in the choking pit; and on its shores, always gray with a mixture of mud and salt, of course no green thing can grow. Indeed, there is little plant life anywhere round about, but as if in mockery there grow nearby what are known as apples of Sodom or Dead Sea fruit. This fruit looks like an orange, but it is bitter to the taste and filled only with fibre and dust.

The official report of Lieutenant Lynch, of the United States Navy, who headed an expedition sent out by the government to explore the Dead Sea and the surrounding regions, is full of word pictures which might well have supplied material for the imagination of Dante.

LIKE A VAT OF MOLTEN METAL

The sea, yellow from the large amount of phosphorus in the water, is overhung in the early morning by a dense mist. This mist is made by the water steaming in the intense heat. It looks, however, like smoke above a great vat of molten metal "fused but motionless." After dark, when the night winds come down from the heights and go moaning through the gorges, the scene changes.

"The surface becomes one wide sheet of phosphorescent foam, and the waves, as they break on the shore, throw a sepulchral light on the white skeletons of dead trees which have been washed from the woody banks of the Jordan and, lying half buried in the sand, are coated with gray salt from the muddy spray."

On a portion of the land now covered by the lake, according to tradition, were the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and after their destruction these bitter waters flowed in and forever buried the scene of their wickedness from the sight of men.

It seems probable that the region did once support a larger population. We know this to be true of other parts of the Orient which have since become desolate owing to the ravages of war, the change of climate, and the decay of Oriental civilization. And when we recall how the sinking of the great earth block that carried this land so far below the level of the sea forced lava up through the earth cracks, we can account for "the fire from heaven" that poured down upon the cities of the plain.

Professor Huntington, who headed the Yale Expedition into Palestine in 1909, speaks of visiting the ruins of Suweim south of the Dead Sea and picking up bits of lava (the whole region abounds in evidences of volcanic action) while the sheik who acted as guide told the story of Sodom as the story of Suweim. The name Suweim, Professor Huntington thinks, may be a corruption of Sodom. Continuing, he says:[41]

"The place is much greener than the other side of the valley, and in the days of Lot may have been 'like the garden of Jehovah'[42]; for in those times, as our studies of old levels of the Dead Sea quite clearly indicate, the climate of Palestine was probably decidedly moister than it is now.

"And not two miles from Suweim we found a little volcano of very recent date geologically, and an eruption may have wrought havoc in a town located near Suweim."

[41] "Palestine and Its Transformation."

[42] Genesis 13:10.

In one part of the valley he also found a cave among the mountains, hewn out of the limestone above a spring.

Now turn to your Bible, Genesis 9:30:

"And Lot went up out of Zoar and dwelt in the mountain, in a cave, he and his two daughters."

In short, the geography of the region—such is the conclusion of Professor Huntington's careful study—"supplies all the elements of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in exactly the location where the Biblical account would lead one to expect them."

But the native Arab goes further. Not far from the borders of the Dead Sea is a mountain of salt called Jebel Usdem, which "the early and later rains" in the course of ages have dissolved into many fantastic shapes. Among these strange figures is a pillar tapering toward the top, on which is a wide cap of stone, such as that shown on page 60 and such as are often seen on detached and pillared rocks.

But this gaunt remnant of grisly gray, although it is still obviously a part of the mountain and cannot be less than forty feet high, your Arab friend insists was once the wife of Lot!

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

If you were hunting for mountain lakes where would you expect to find the most, in high mountains or in low?

Rivers sometimes make lakes by using the same stuff the small boys do, just plain mud. Look at Lake Pontchartrain in the map of Louisiana and you can see one of the ways in which this is done. Remember that all the land around this lake is part of the delta of the Mississippi. The river deposits have simply enclosed a portion of the shallow sea.

Or—this is another way in which rivers make lakes by building mud walls—a river emptying at right angles into a narrow gulf may build a dam clear across it. The rich Imperial Valley of southern California was cut off from the Gulf of California in this way. Look at the map and you can see just how this was done.

One of the puzzles about mountain lakes is how frogs got into them. The frogs never climbed up there, you may be sure. Muir thinks maybe the ducks did it. How do you suppose? See if you can imagine and then see what Muir says about it.[43]

[43] "The Mountains of California."

In connection with what was said about lakes playing they are oceans—not these little mountain lakes, of course, but great big lakes—you will be interested in what Lord Bryce says in his "Travels in South America" about why lakes may even look larger than the ocean.

In the Britannica and other books that you may not yet be old enough to read you will find many more curious things about lakes. I can't tell which one of my readers you are, you see, but if you belong to the "younger set," father, mother, or some other member of the family can do the looking up and then tell you about it.[44] In the Britannica will be found such interesting things as this:

[44] I don't know of anything that is more fun, of an evening, than looking up things in an encyclopædia—except looking them up in two encyclopædias.

How certain kinds of mountains and lakes are made at one and the same time—by the same movement.

How even the wind may make lakes.

Why lakes are to the land what lands are to the sea.

Then if you will turn to page 75 of that fascinating little book we have already dipped into several times[45] you will find what the fact that lakes are to the land what islands are to the sea has to do with a peculiar beetle in the Shetland Islands (where the ponies come from) and the famous tailless cat of the Isle of Man.

[45] "Colin Clout's Calendar."

One of the quaintest little bits of real life in Lakeland is how the baby gulls of the Great Lakes worry their papas and mamas by going swimming before they are old enough; how their parents give them a spanking and send them back home; and how kind all the lady gulls are to the little gulls of neighbors that come to their houses to play with their children.[46]

[46] "The Bird, Our Brother," by Olive Thorne Miller.

DROWNED VALLEYS ON THE MAINE COAST

Wherever you see very irregular shores, as along the coast of Maine, you may infer that the shores have sunk so that the waters of the sea came up into the river valleys, and the hills and long tongues of high land became islands and peninsulas.