WHY SEA WAVES RISE TO GREET THE MOUNTAINS
One of the strangest, most poetic phases of the relation between the great blue mountains and the great blue sea is that waves, as they approach the shores of continents bordered by mountain ranges, rise higher and higher; and the higher the mountains, the higher rise the waves. These waves are not driven by wind or tide but seem drawn forward by some strange power. This power, however, is no stranger than the one that makes us fall and bump our noses when we stub our toes—the power of gravitation, according to which all masses attract each other. It is the mass in the mountains that exerts a pull on the waves; and the greater the mountains the greater the pull, of course. In the Indian Ocean, for example, around the head of the Arabian Sea, the waves rise far above sea level, largely because there is beyond them, on the land, one of the greatest mountain masses in the world.
Wouldn't it give you a queer feeling if you were, say, a sailor, and for the first time saw waves act like that? Uncanny, almost, isn't it?
But do the mountains remember their old parent of the white flowing rocks and beard, Father Neptune? They act as if they did; particularly in the way in which they come to imitate, in time, the shape of the waves of the sea.
Ruskin,[21] speaking to artists about drawing mountains, says:
"Good and intelligent mountain drawing recognizes a great harmony among the summits and their tendency to throw themselves into waves, closely resembling those of the sea itself; sometimes in free tossing toward the sky, but more frequently in the form of breakers, concave and steep on one side, convex and less steep on the other."
[21] "Modern Painters," Chapter IV.
When you stand some day on one of the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and look out over the great fields of upheaved stone, you will notice how closely the parallel ridges resemble ranks of waves making toward a shore. Like sea waves also, the vast backs of these waves of stone are long and sloping, while their fronts are comparatively short and much steeper. Another thing that makes you feel as if you were looking out upon a sea whose waves had been changed to stone is the fact that these stone waves are not only green but have white caps; for in the valleys, and far up the sides of the mountains, are the forests with the perennial green of their pines, and on the peaks the eternal snows.
"AND EVERY TOSSING OF THEIR BOUNDLESS CRESTS"