Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/162

 152 look like Broadway, so smooth and even and slippery are their shape and aspect. A few rods farther, and we reach the upper section of the chasm.

The Mexican Giant's Causeway is before us. We had regretted that Britain had one advantage of America in her celebrated Fingal's Cave, and now we are satisfied. Even that crown is transferred to our favored land. The columns of basalt rise on each side of the ravine from seventy-five to one hundred feet in height. The opening is a few hundred feet wide at the mouth, but comes together at the upper edge, with only a slight chasm, which lets out the waters of the river, that tumbles, a pretty cascade, some twoscore of feet into a pretty pool below. You are fifty feet or so above the pool. The columns rise one hundred feet sheer over your head. They are five-sided, and fit each to each as close as bricks. Some of the outer ones are split and otherwise marred; one or two seem to have lost both their head and their heels, and hang to their place by a sort of attraction of adhesion. If that gave way, the attraction of gravitation would topple them over upon our heads—a not very attractive attraction. The débris of their fallen fellows lies all about us. Each reveals a round core of light slate-color, that seems to have been built around after the pentagonal model. Where that core came from, and how it was grown around, I leave to those who find sermons in stones to ascertain. I prefer less hardened subjects.

There seems to be no end inward to the serried ranks. They are packed close, and each shaft reveals others that inclose it, and that are ready to take its place should sun and shower cause it to fall. If they could be utilized by some Yankee for house or monument building, we should soon see an end of the exquisite ravine. They are slaughtering the like tall living shafts that have stood together these centuries and centuries from Maine to Michigan, and Michigan to Mexico. Thanks many (muchas gracias, to be very Mexic) that they can not cut these down, saw them into stone lumber, and cart them away for Chicago and Boston burnings. Just penalty was that, for that sin of ourselves and our fathers?