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Show 186 BY PATH AND TRAIL. agatized tree, spanning a miniature canyon twenty- five feet deep and thirty feet wide, on which a man may safely cross. The tree is in an excellent state of preser vation and shows no marks of sand abrasion; it lies diagonally across the ravine and measures a span of forty- four feet. From end to butt the tree is 110 feet long and, as with all the stone logs of this quarter of the forest, there are no branches adhering to top or body. So much of the material of the forest retains its natural color, bark and shape, and so true is the piling that looking on them one would be inclined to believe tnat some settler, who was clearing the land, had left for dinner and might at any moment return and fire the pile. Another very singular and as yet unexplained phenome non are the rings or divisionary markings encircling many of the logs from end to end. These ring marks girdle the trunks every eighteen inches and do not vary the eighth of an inch. Either by the disintegration of the mesa or by torrential floods the trees have been car ried down from higher levels and in the moving suffered many fractures, some of them being broken into frag ments. Now all these logs, measuring from twenty to ninety feet, broke transversely and every time the break was on the ring. How these rings were formed remains to this day an unsolved problem. The material of these trees is so hard that some years ago an abrasive com pany of Chicago made preparations to grind the logs into emery. Their plant was brought from Chicago to Adamana, where it is now falling to pieces from rust and neglect. In answer to my enquiry why it was not set up, I was told tnat a Canadian company, at about the same time, began at Montreal the manufacture of abrasive sand and lowered the price of the material below the |
