THE BEAUTY OF THE BRIDAL VEIL
And, although they didn't make the rivers themselves, the Ice Age Glaciers are held responsible for the fact that many little rivers always have to jump to catch the train. That is to say, they come tumbling over falls to join the larger streams into which they empty. The reason of this is that when, in the Ice Age, the glaciers filled the river valleys the larger glaciers in a main valley dug below the tributary valleys and so left the mouths of the tributary rivers high up on the main valley's walls. The famous "Bridal Veil" in the Yosemite is one of these side valley falls. The fall—900 feet—is so great that the water widens to a fleecy foam and waves back and forth in the wind like a gauzy veil and, instead of a roar like Niagara, it makes a rustling sound like silk.
While some rivers come hurrying down like that—as if they really were afraid the larger river would go off and leave them—others, like the Amazon, roll on as stately as a Lord Mayor's procession. But the waters of all are on their way to the sea. The rock layers, owing to the wrinkling of the earth as it shrinks, are nowhere level, so flowing water is always on a down grade, sloping toward the sea or toward other land that does slope toward the sea. Then remember too as the sea bottom keeps sinking the continents keep rising, which increases the pitch of the land.
JUMPING TO CATCH THE TRAIN
See the famous Bridal Veil Falls in the Yosemite Valley hurrying down to reach the river below. As the stream descends, it broadens into a beautiful, filmy veil.
All very simple, but none the less grand and impressive. Ruskin, in one of the noblest of his passages, says:
"[All water courses], from the inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village land in trembling clearness to the massy and silent march of the Amazon and the Ganges, owe their play and power to the ordained elevations of the earth; [to] paths prepared for them by which at some appointed rate of journey they must evermore descend, sometimes slow and sometimes swift, but never pausing, the gateways of guarding mountains opened for them in cleft and chasm, and from afar off the great heart of the sea calling them to itself."
That's a poetic way of putting it, but it's a fact nevertheless.
II. The Human Nature in Rivers