“People’s bones?” asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.
“Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had an anxious time of it!” returned the sage. “No, no, my dear. There was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and iguanodon,—lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house.”
“How did they get there?”
“Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off and left them high and dry.”
“But where did the water go to?”
The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. “She knows more questions than you do the answers to them,” quoth he. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to see some of it back again.”
“Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There’s a hundred and thirty degrees of heat in some of these valleys,—abysses, rather, three or four hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this region, too, and whatever water wasn’t evaporated from above would be likely to come to grief underneath.”
“But, professor,” said the musical voice, “I thought there was a law that water always seeks its own level. So how can there be empty places below sea-level?”
“It’s the fault of the aneroid barometer, my dear. We were very comfortable and commonplace until that came along and revealed anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata, which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all through the desert; and there’s a good deal of lava oozing over them, too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the west, or the Colorado leaking in from the east.”
“In that case,” remarked the general, “a little more seismic disturbance might produce a change.”