rag near the top of the peak fell and
came crashing and rumbling down the slope. During the next two hours
I counted the rumbling crash of forty others. I know not how many small
avalanches may have slipped during this time that I did not hear. The
next day I went about looking at the new landscapes and the strata
laid bare by erosion and landslide, and up near the top of this peak
I found a large glaciated lava boulder. A lava boulder that has been
shaped by the ice and has for a time found a resting-place in a
sedentary formation, then been uplifted to near a mountain-top, has a
wonder-story of its own. One day I came across a member of the United
States Geological Survey who had lost his way. At my camp-fire that
evening I asked him to hug facts and tell me a possible story of the
glaciated lava boulder. The following is his account:--

The shaping of that boulder must have antedated by ages the shaping of
the Sphinx, and its story, if acceptably told, would seem more like
fancy than fact. If the boulder were to relate, briefly, its
experiences, it might say: "I helped burn forests and strange cities
as I came red-hot from a volcano's throat, and I was scarcely cool
when disintegration brought flowers to cover my dead form. By and by a
long, long winter came, and toward the close of it I was sheared off,
ground, pushed, rolled, and rounded beneath the ice. 'Why are you
grinding me up?' I asked the glacier. 'To make food for the trees and
the flowers during the earth's next temperate epoch,' it answered. One
day a river swept me out of its delta and I rolled to the bottom of
the sea. Here I lay for I know not how long, with sand and boulders
piling upon me. Here heat, weight, and water fixed me in a stratum
of materials that had accumulated below and above me. My stratum was
displaced before it was thoroughly solidified, and I felt myself
slowly raised until I could look out over the surface of the sea. The
waves at once began to wear me, and they jumped up and tore at me
until I was lifted above their reach. At last, when I was many
thousand feet above the waves, I came to a standstill. Then my
mountain-top was much higher than at present. For a long time I looked
down upon a tropical world. I am now wondering if the Ice King will
come for me again."

The Engelmann spruce forest here is an exceptionally fine one, and the
geologist and I discussed it and trees in general. Some of the Indian
tribes of the Rockies hav