Studying their ancient records one
could see that they had been familiar with the star that rested
over Bethlehem. On their faces had shone the same moon that
opened the highways Journeying into Damascus. They had stood the
storms that had beaten upon the world since the days when the
floods subsided, the land lifted above the face of the waters in
gigantic upheavals that had ripped the surface of the globe from
north to south and forced up the hills, the foothills, and the
mountains of the Coast Range. They had been born then, they had
first seen the light of day, in glowing, molten, red-hot,
high-piled streams of lava that had gushed forth in that awful
evolution of birth.
Sometimes Linda stopped the car, they left it, and climbed over
the faces of these mighty upheavals. Once Linda reached her hand
to Donald and cried, half laughingly, half in tense earnest:
"Oh, kid, we have got to hurry. Compared with the age of these,
we've only a few minutes. It's all right to talk jestingly about
'the crack of doom' but you know there really was a crack of
doom, and right here is where it cracked and spewed out the
material that hardened into these very rocks. Beside them I feel
as a shrimp must feel beside a whale, and I feel that we must
hurry."
"And so we must," said Donald. "I'm hungry as Likeliest when he
waited for them to find enough peacock tongues to satisfy his
appetite."
"I wonder what brand of home-brew made him think of that," said
Linda.
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