Strange in the few suggestive glimpses we may get of
it - forests in which palm trees wave their royal crowns, and strange
animals roaming beneath them or about the reedy margins of lakes, the
oreodon, the lophiodon, and several extinct species of the horse, the
camel, and other animals.
Then came the fire period with its darkening showers of ashes and
cinders and its vast floods of molten lava, making quite another
Oregon from the fair and fertile land of the preceding era. And
again, while yet the volcanic fires show signs of action in the smoke
and flame of the higher mountains, the whole region passes under the
dominion of ice, and from the frost and darkness and death of the
Glacial Period, Oregon has but recently emerged to the kindly warmth
and life of today.
XXIV
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado
Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth's wonders, new and old,
spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his
slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads
for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager, like the
Devil, to show him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and
foolishness, spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam,
abolishing space and time and almost everything else.
