His ladders and pipes, and all his hopeful apparatus, are
clinging now like cobwebs to the face of the bluff, against that flashing,
creaming broadside of the springs at their greatest height and fall. I was
pitying the poor man and his folly, but Tom says the plan is perfectly
feasible.
The wall of the river canon is built up in stories of basalt rock, each
story defined by a horizontal fissure, out of which these mysterious waters
gush, white and cold, taking glorious colors in the sunlight from the rich
under-painting of the rock. There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that
sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the
bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might
the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty
island between itself and the river. Winter and summer the volume of water
never varies, and the rate of discharge is always the same, and the water
is never cold, though I have just said it is. It looks cold until the rocks
warm it with their gemlike tints, like a bride's jewels gleaming through
her veil. Back of the bluffs, where it might be supposed to come from,
there is nothing for a hundred miles but drought and desert plains.
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