The Book of Earth
9781465672681
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth. Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon, Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine, I came to the dreadful brink. I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth Splitting apart, into two hemispheres, Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god. On the brink of the Grand Canyon, Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows, From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down, Down from abyss to abyss, Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings, The inhuman ages, alien as the moon, Æons unborn, and the unimagined end. There, on the terrible brink, against the sky, I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down. A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock, The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it. It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun. All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots. I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men. Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss Endlessly on. Far down, as a cloud sailed over, A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs, Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite, Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow With smouldering colours of those buried fires Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb. And there, so far below that not a sound, Even in that desert air, rose from its bed, I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado, The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade, The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains, For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder, Rolls to the broad Pacific. From Flaming Gorge, Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain Of subject canyons, the green river flows, Linking them all together in one vast gulch, But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn, With names like pictures, for six hundred miles: Black Canyon, where it rushes in opal foam; Red Canyon, where it sleeks to jade again And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below; Split-Mountain Canyon, with its cottonwood trees; And, opening out of this, Whirlpool Ravine, Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire; Kingfisher Canyon, gorgeous as the plumes Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues; Glen Canyon, where the Cave of Music rang Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song; Vermilion Cliffs, like sunset clouds congealed To solid crags; the Valley of Surprise Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass; Labyrinth Canyon, and the Valley of Echoes; Cataract Canyon, rolling boulders down In floods of emerald thunder; Gunnison’s Valley Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail; Then, for a hundred miles, Desolation Canyon, Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world; Gray Canyon next; then Marble Canyon, stained With iron-rust above, but brightly veined As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it; Then deep Still-water.
