Shasta Is A Fire-Mountain, An Old Volcano Gradually Accumulated And
Built Up Into The Blue Deep Of The Sky
By successive eruptions of
ashes and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in
darkening showers, and
Flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward
and upward like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand
convulsion was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of
volcanic storm and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet
in height have been cast up like molehills in a night - quick
contributions to the wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic
statements, on the part of Nature, of the gigantic character of the
power that dwells beneath the dull, dead-looking surface of the earth.
But sections cut by the glaciers, displaying some of the internal
framework of Shasta, show that comparatively long periods of
quiescence intervened between many distinct eruptions, during which
the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and took their places as permanent
additions to the bulk of the growing mountain. Thus with alternate
haste and deliberation eruption succeeded eruption, until Mount Shasta
surpassed even its present sublime height.
Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on. The
sky that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes
and lighted by the glare of volcanic fires was filled with crystal
snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to
glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand
conical glacier - a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of
smouldering fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and
thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base.
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