ht begin to pour into the road below;
or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
mountain bury the scene of our encampment.

I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All
below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid,
rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the
canyon up, was a creature of man's handiwork, its material dug out with a
pick and powder, and spread by the service of the trucks. But nature
herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing
besides mining; and even the natural hillside was all sliding gravel and
precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay
to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture and
decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature's alchemy, concoct
enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in
the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock
being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty
in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with
quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came
the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and cinnabar,
if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce.
Now, the Crown Prince had it in his undisturbed possession, to pound
down and slake, and paint his rude designs with. But to me it had always
a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and
Hawthornden's allusion:

"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . ."

Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another
side to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet
out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden
bloomed as at home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy
weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth
its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral.
Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the
hill