Across America by Motor-cycle

by C. K. Shepherd

There is but one ridge ahead to climb. The rocky trail bends and twists as it slowly swallows up the gradient that connects us to the horizon. A final swerve, and we commence a slight descent. There is a gap in the hills; the trail skirts around one side, and behold, a vast, unbounded plain lies before us, stretching to left and right as far as the eye can see.

But what is this strange sight? On our right, barely a half of a mile from the road, is a gigantic mound. Its presence there, rising abruptly out of the mathematical flatness of the plain, seems ridiculous, absurd, uncanny. It gives the impression of having been just dropped from the sky. It is a mud volcano—an uncommon sight, and formed by the ejection of sand under pressure from below the surface of the earth. All around, the plain is of distinctly volcanic formation. Indeed, we have now entered a vast volcanic region, extending for several thousands of square miles. Many of the mountains that we shall see, some of them giant peaks, and some only little hills, are extinct volcanoes of other ages. They were young and active while man was in his barbaric infancy on this weary globe, perhaps even before that.

But soon is to appear a far more wondrous sight. In a few miles we enter a country of strange shapes and magic colours—the Petrified Forest of Arizona. The first signs of approach are chains of little lava hills of grey and white. They also have an air of abruptness. One wonders how they came to be there at all. Flowing down to the flat plain in graceful, mathematical curves, they look like mounds of chalk, although they are softer still. Composed of soft, fine lava-dust, they weather rapidly away. Now all the plain is lava-dust and a tuft of lean grass here and there has found a spot wherein to make a home. Further on one notices great blocks of stone, like pillars of marble, lying strewn about the plain, some half buried, some barely projecting, and some perfectly naked. Here is one, there is another—they are everywhere, in every direction, of all shades of colour and varying in size from fragments an inch in diameter to pillars twenty or thirty feet in girth and over 100 feet in length. Every fragment, every massive block of marble once formed part of a great forest that spread for hundreds of square miles. The trees of this great forest were huge leviathans, unlike anything we know of in the Old World and similar only to the giant Sequoias of California (but a few hundred miles away), that send their mighty trunks hundreds of feet into the air—the relics of a bygone race.

This great forest of Arizona was at its prime. The stately pine trees rose towering into the sky. Birds of wonderful plumage lived in those mighty branches, and wild animals roamed amongst its undergrowth. Then something happened; no one knows exactly what—this great forest was enveloped in volcanic dust that in time buried it completely. To the eye, if eye there was to witness the scene, the forest was no longer visible; it lay buried in the bowels of the earth; it had passed away; as a mighty, living forest it would exist no more. But those monster trees remained awhile, preserved by the all-surrounding lava. What happened then took thousands of years to achieve, though it can be recited in a few brief words. The trees in substance disappeared, but their forms remained in the hardened lava, like huge moulds waiting to be cast, their every crack and wrinkle preserved with inexorable accuracy. In time, it may have been æons, the moulds were cast, by some inexplicable phenomenon, and where once were timber and vegetable tissues came fluid marble rock that filled the hollows and cracks and wrinkles and reproduced the forms that ages before had been so suddenly arrested in their growth. Further ages passed, and gradually the soft lava was removed by the action of wind and rain and other causes. Gradually the harder material was laid bare, and the giant trees once more saw the light of day, but this time they were trunks of solid marble instead of pine wood. The work of denudation continued. The marble pillars, unsupported, fell to earth. Some broke into huge blocks, while others remained more or less intact through the whole of their length, and unless one examined them at close quarters and saw the nature of their texture, they could not be distinguished from a tree that had been recently felled.

There are hundreds of these marble pine and spruce tree trunks, whose cross-sections, revealed where they have broken, glisten with every colour of the rainbow. In places, where they lie tumbled and heaped together, it is as though a whole quarry of onyx had been dynamited out. In one place a fallen trunk of marble, nearly 200 feet in length, has spanned a gorge and formed a natural log bridge that all who dare can walk across.

Such is the fairy tale that scientists tell. The traveller whose privilege it is to journey across the Petrified Forest of Arizona will be lost in amazement at this fact which is so much stranger than any fiction.

I left the wonderful scene behind me with a feeling that I was bidding farewell to one of the prime mysteries of the world. Trunks and fragments of trunks could be seen projecting even from the surface of the road over which I passed, and a few blades of fine grass, with here and there a stunted cactus plant, were the only sign of life in any direction. I passed out as suddenly as I had entered. A double S-bend, where strange contorted rocks lay piled up in confusion on either side—and the Petrified Forest was left behind.