Read Online Centennial by James A. Michener - Free Book Online Page B

before it as it scratched and clawed its way eastward. In the space of an afternoon, such a flood might carve away deposits which had required ten million years to accumulate.
    It was the river which had laid down the new land; it was the river which took it away. The endless cycle of building up, tearing down and rebuilding, using the same material over and over, was contributed to by the river. It was the brawling, undisciplined, violent artery of life and would always be.
    The major characteristics of land around Centennial were now fairly well determined and there is little more to report. There were, however, four special places of no great consequence in the grand scheme of things but around which much of this story will revolve.
    The first was a chalk cliff running north-south some miles northwest of Centennial. Its basic components had been laid down some two hundred and seventy million years ago during that period when the Ancestral Rockies were disintegrating and washing out to sea. At the bottom of this sea huge beds of limestone accumulated in flat layers, one above the other like sheaves of paper in a pile. This limestone was infinitely older than the New Rockies and constituted yet another example of how the earth’s material was used, broken down, accumulated, conserved and reissued in new form.
    For about one hundred million years this limestone bed lay flat, sometimes exposed but usually at the bottom of some sea. Then internal turbulence within the mantle uplifted the area so that it stood as high as some mountains. No sooner had it moved into its elevated position than it was visited by a racking accident: a large fault wrenched the surface of the earth, depressed the area and cracked the limestone along its north-south axis. The eastern portion dropped some eighty feet below its previous level, while the western half rose twenty, forming a white chalk cliff about one hundred feet high.
    There it stood, one hundred and thirty-six million years ago, a chalky white cliff with a rain forest on its upper plateau and a great swamp bathing its feet, ready for the dramatic incidents which would occur along its margin.
    The second place was a moderately high mountain valley to the west of Centennial and slightly to the south. A small stream of water ran the length of the valley before joining the river; it had been the cause of the valley’s existence. The valley was not ancient, for it developed only in the later stages of mountain building; it could not have been any more than forty million years old, but throughout its brief life it had always been a place of exceptional beauty.
    It ran almost due east and west and was only a few miles long. Its sides were formed by steep mountains which hemmed it in; it was not wide, the mountain walls being less than a mile apart, and it had a gentle fall, the higher end being at the west. Its beauty was gemlike rather than expansive.
    During its existence it had undergone little change. It had started at an elevation of only four thousand feet, but at the great uplifting fifteen million years ago it had been raised to an elevation of ten thousand feet. Subsequent erosion had lowered this to eight thousand, just low enough to make possible one of the features which made it memorable.
    On the north wall, which of course received the sun, a thick grove of aspen trees developed about one million years ago to form a thing of joy. The trees heralded spring as it was about to appear, their small gray-green leaves shimmering in the sun. In midsummer their leaves were exquisite, for they were attached to their branches in a peculiar manner which left them free to flutter constantly; the slightest breath of air set the aspen shaking so that at times the entire north wall of the valley seemed to be dancing. It was in the autumn, however, that the aspen came into its true glory, for then each leaf turned a brilliant gold, so that a single tree seemed an explosion of vibrating