As to comparative altitudes, it may be noted that Mount St. Elias, of the Alaska Coast Range, is three thousand five hundred feet higher than Mont Blanc, “the monarch of mountains,” as Byron calls it, while its namesake, the Sierra Blanca, the monarch of the Rockies, is nearly as lofty with its triple peak. The Rock of Gibraltar towers to the height of twelve hundred feet; its massive counterpart in the Yosemite, El Capitan, is three times as high as Gibraltar, while the great cliff known as Cloud’s Rest, admittedly the finest panoramic stand-point on earth, is more than six thousand feet high and ten thousand above sea level. As to glaciers, while it is worth a trip across the Atlantic to see the ice masses of the Rhone glacier from the Furca Pass, or the motionless billows of the Mer de Glace at Montanvert, they are overmatched in Alaska by the Muir, the Guyot, the Tyndall, and the Agassiz.
As to lakes, every school child knows that Lake Superior is the largest body of fresh water in the world. It is large enough to bury the whole of Scotland in its translucent depths. The area of the Lake of Geneva is greater than that of the Yellowstone Lake; but while the former is only twelve hundred feet above the sea, the latter is seven thousand seven hundred and forty feet—nearly a mile and a half—above the level of the sea. As to salt lakes, the Caspian Sea is not as salt as the ocean, while our American Dead Sea, the Salt Lake of Utah, has six times the saline strength of the waters of the ocean.
There is a lake in Italy—Castiglione—whose turquoise hues, paler than those of the Blue Grotto of Capri, command merited admiration. Yet the prismatic lakes in the Yellowstone Park are numerous, particularly in the Midway Geyser Basin, where they reflect with remarkable brilliancy different colors of the spectrum, prominently among them emerald green, peacock blue, and golden yellow. The most beautiful mirror lakes are in the Sierra Nevada region, and the gem of all mirrors is that of the Yosemite Valley, of which Mr. Hutchings, the historian and geographer of the valley, says,—
“There is one spot of earth known to man, where one mountain four thousand two hundred feet high, Mt. Watkins; another over six thousand feet, Cloud’s Rest; and another five thousand feet, the Half Dome, are all perfectly reflected upon one small lakelet. Here, moreover, the sun can be seen to rise many times on a single morning.”
In the lake district of the north of England there are sixteen lakes, with many attractive features, but largely centres of pilgrimage as the homes of Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Harriet Martineau. Our Canadian neighbors, in the highlands of Ontario, can point to eight hundred lakes in the Muskoka region, with five hundred islands studded with beautiful villas and summer hotels. Two of the Swiss waterfalls, the Falls of the Rhine at Neuhausen, with a plunge of eighty feet in three leaps, and the falls of the Aar at Handeck, with a broken plunge of two hundred feet, are said to be the largest in Europe. The former is surpassed in picturesque beauty by the Virginia Cascade of the Gibbon River in the Yellowstone Park, and the latter is not worth naming in the same week with the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, as, with a magnificent sweep of three hundred and ten feet, the heavy downpour, with its clouds of snowy spray, enters the canyon which is the culmination of all the bewildering “formations” of the great national reservation.
The cascades of the Reuss, near Andermatt, are justly famous for their tumultuous rush, but the rapids of the Gardiner River in the Yellowstone, and the Merced in the Yosemite, are more boisterous and more beautiful. The much vaunted Giessbach in the Bernese Oberland has a total fall of one thousand one hundred and forty-eight feet, but it is broken into seven sections. Of the various falls in the Yosemite Valley, the highest has a descent of two thousand six hundred feet, with only two interruptions, the upper division having a clear plunge of one thousand six hundred feet. Among great cataracts, as every one knows, Niagara holds the supremacy. In the majesty and sublimity reflected in the overwhelming torrents that are hurled over its precipice, in the resistless energy of its roaring rapids and its turbulent whirlpools, it sets its own standard, and “bears no brother near the throne.”
Caves and grottoes, calcareous and basaltic, are widely spread throughout Europe, but, numerous as they are, if they were all grouped together they could be packed in the heights and depths of the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky. Of that stupendous cavern, with a main avenue of six miles and branches of more than a hundred miles in extent, Bayard Taylor said,—
“No description can do justice to its sublimity, or present a fair picture of its manifold wonders. It is the greatest natural curiosity I have ever visited, and he whose expectations are not satisfied by its marvellous avenues, domes, and sparry grottoes, must be either a fool or a demigod.”
The historic caves of Europe abound with the remains of ancient cave-dwellers which are of great interest to archæologists, but the lofty and almost inaccessible abodes of the cliff-dwellers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona present a wider range of curious inquiry to the student of remote antiquity. Scientists propose to make more extended and comprehensive investigation of these hewn-out homes of the cliff-dwellers in the far West than has yet been made by neglectful explorers. In the ruins of the habitations of a long extinct race in Mancos Canyon, Colorado, they will find abundant material for anthropological research. Perched on narrow ledges seven hundred feet above the valley are numerous ancient dwellings, with well built sandstone walls, with rooms in a good state of preservation, and with scattered specimens of fine pottery and fragments of implements of war and peace. Here and there are watch-towers commanding views of the whole valley.
In the Chaco Canyon are ruins of pueblos still more extensive, once the homes of thousands of people who lived thousands of years ago, and, according to Hayden, in the Geological Survey for 1866, “pre-eminently the finest examples of the works of the unknown builders to be found north of the seat of ancient Aztec empire in Mexico.” A few miles southeast of Flagstaff, Arizona, are more of these retreats far up on rocky crags, and within a similar radius northward are many cave dwellings, but they only stimulate conjecture; they have left behind neither history nor tradition.