[Enlarge]

Many hours may be spent with interest upon this lava bed. It is an area of the wildest violence, cast in stone. Swift, ropy streams, cascades, whirling eddies, all have been caught in their course. "Devil's Punch Bowl," "Hell's Kitchen," "Satan's Stairway" are suggestive phrases of local description. The underground galleries here are well worth visiting. Tree tunnels and wells abound. Most important of all, the struggle seen everywhere of the forest to gain a foothold on this iron surface illustrates Nature's method of hiding so vast and terrible a callus upon her face. It is evident that the healing of the wound began as soon as the lava cooled, and that, while still incomplete, it is unceasingly prosecuted. (See p. [111].)

The first volcanic dust from the uneasy crater of St. Helens had no sooner lodged in some cleft opened by the contraction of cooling than a spore or seed carried by the wind or dropped by a bird made a start toward vegetation. Failing moisture, and checked by lack of soil, the lichen or grass or tiny shrub quickly yielded its feeble existence in preparation for its successor. The procession of rain and sun encouraged other futile efforts to find rootage. Each of these growths lengthened by its decay the life of the next. With winter came frost, scaling flakes from the hard surface, or penetrating the joints and opening fissures in the basalt. Further refuge was thus made ready for the dust and seeds and moisture of another season. The moss and plants were promoters as well as beneficiaries of this disintegration. Their smallest rootlets found the water in the heart of the rocks, and growing strong upon it, shattered their benefactors.

COPYRIGHT, B. A. GIFFORD

"And forests ranged like armies, round and round
At feet of mountains of eternal snow;
And valleys all alive with happy sound,—
The song of birds; swift streams' delicious flow;
The mystic hum of million things that grow."—Helen Hunt Jackson.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.